“That’s a load of crap!” Tomi Lahren exclaimed on Fox News with her typical mix of outraged certitude and barnyard bluntness.
She was sharing her insights on the FBI’s rationale—that there’s negligible public interest in Hillary Clinton’s aging emails—for rejecting a Freedom of Information Act request for same.
Ratcheting up her indignation over an issue that curdled long ago—yet is one of the Fox News Channel’s heavy motifs—Lahren added that the idea that Clinton’s “privacy somehow trumps our right to know” was untenable and that the FBI would be well advised to turn over the thousands and thousands of her missing emails. “I’m sorry—your privacy rights are out the window,” she addressed the former secretary of State and unsuccessful Democratic presidential candidate.
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Then came a lot of chatter about prosecuting Clinton and throwing her in prison. Lahren vowed that she wouldn’t stop pressing the email case until the Democrats and media stopped bleating about Russia, Russia, Russia.
And so the striking, luxuriantly blond-tressed South Dakota native—whose popular nickname, according to her IMDB page, is “White Power Barbie”—spent her first night on Wednesday’s installment of Hannity as an official Fox News contributor.
The 25-year-old Donald Trump acolyte—a phenom on social media whose Facebook videos (in which she recites her furious screeds against the likes of Black Lives Matter from what looks like the driver’s seat of a well-leathered luxury sedan) boast more than 4 million followers—has finally gone totally legit.
She has snagged a presumably lucrative gig on the Trump-friendly cable network—which will probably require her to relocate to New York from Dallas, where until five months ago she’d hosted an eponymous television show on Glenn Beck’s The Blaze—after manifesting her genius for self-dramatization and career-enhancing controversy.
Lahren’s showbiz credits include her debate against the liberal South African comedian Trevor Noah on The Daily Show last December—more heat than light, with Noah slyly puncturing her flimsier claims when not giggling and rolling his eyes—and then, best of all in terms of savvy branding, the riveting moment when Beck summarily sacked her from The Blaze, prompting a fusillade of nasty litigation, after she went on The View in March and declared herself in favor of abortion rights.
On Wednesday night, both Hannity and Geraldo Rivera—Lahren’s supposedly liberal adversary, like Lahren, appearing remotely—effusively welcomed her to the (possibly dysfunctional) Fox News family with a slavering undertone of aging-male bonhomie.
The 55-year-old Hannity warned Rivera that he was going, for obvious reasons, to call on Lahren first, and the 74-year-old, mustachioed Rivera (by his own account, a voracious ladies’ man in his day, with a lascivious glint in his eye) said that if he were running the show, he’d also let Lahren get the ball rolling.
“I’m gonna go to her first all the time,” Hannity threatened.
“I would hope so,” said Rivera, who—let’s be honest—looks miraculously well-preserved. “So would I.”
“Welcome to the Fox News Channel,” Hannity added. “Our audience is very familiar with you—you’ve been on a ton of times before.”
“Welcome, Tomi,” Rivera crooned. “Although I obviously disagree with many of her political positions, I think she has intelligence, she’s reasonable, and she’s got, most importantly, to me and you, true grit.”
Yet Lahren smirked, shook her head in mock astonishment, and rolled her eyes when Rivera argued that Hillary Clinton’s emails were old news of no importance—“Enough already!”—and that Republicans and Trumpkins only damaged themselves by constantly bringing them up. He mentioned South Carolina Rep. Trey Gowdy as having damaged his political prospects and just-resigned Utah congressman Jason Chaffetz as having “destroyed his career” because of his Clinton email obsession.
“It didn’t destroy his career,” Hannity chimed in. “He’s at Fox.”
Just like Lahren.
