Moments after Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden said Congress must move forward with an impeachment inquiry if President Donald Trump doesn’t comply with a request to turn over the whistleblower complaint, Fox News anchor Shepard Smith set the record straight that the narrative being pushed by Team Trump on Biden and Ukraine is “baseless” and a “conspiracy theory.”
And in doing so, Smith unsubtly took shots at many of his pro-Trump Fox News colleagues, especially the loudest boosters like Sean Hannity, who has been at the forefront of providing cover for the president.
“There you have it,” Smith said after Biden’s comments. “Joe Biden, discussing the allegations against him, which have indeed been proven baseless, at least at this point.”
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The Fox News anchor—who has previously said the “real issue” is Trump’s Ukrainian call—then went on to explain that allies of the president have pointed to Biden threatening to withhold loan guarantees and aid to Ukraine as proof that the former vice president acted improperly, noting that this is “just not the case.”
Smith proceeded to tell viewers that Biden was delivering a message to Ukraine in 2016—at the behest of other Western leaders—that the country would not receive aid unless it ousted a corrupt prosecutor.
“Eventually the Ukrainian leader got rid of the corrupt prosecutor and, after that, the money was released to the Ukrainians who were fighting a war against our enemies in Russia,” Smith said.
“So that is the basis for all of this conspiracy theory that’s been brought to the forefront as they try to make it a ‘he says this and he says that,’” he added. “The matter at hand is a phone call that the president of the United States admits he had with the leader of Ukraine and in which the president of the United States admits he pressured the leader of Ukraine to investigate his chief rival in the presidential race for 2020.”
The Fox News anchor further noted that the network’s senior judicial analyst Judge Andrew Napolitano—who has already called the president’s Ukraine actions an “act of corruption”—insists that if we are to take the president at his word, then what Trump did is a “crime.”
