Tucker Carlson claimed Monday that he didn’t question Vladimir Putin last month about then-imprisoned Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny because he felt it wouldn’t have achieved anything.
Speaking to NewsNation’s Chris Cuomo, the pair initially bonded in the interview over their similar predicaments: Cuomo’s ouster from CNN in December 2021 and Carlson’s shocking exit from Fox in April 2023. The majority of their discussion, however, revolved around Carlson’s controversial interview with Putin in Moscow last month.
Carlson also continued to fawn over Moscow, with his experience there apparently serving as an “indictment of our ruling class.”
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At one point, Cuomo pressed his former Fox rival about Navalny’s mysterious death last month in a Russian jail.
“What’s actually happening there, I can only guess,” Carlson said, keeping the issue at arm’s length. “I haven’t the faintest idea. Putin put him in prison, OK? So there’s that. So he’s responsible.”
Carlson said that despite coming to the Putin interview prepared with several questions about Navalny, who had survived being poisoned in 2020, he decided not to ask any of them.
“I felt like, ‘What about Navalny?’ Well, whatever he’s going to say, I’m not going to move the ball at all,” he said, despite the ability to get an on-camera response from Putin, whose track record for press freedoms is dismal.
When discussing world leaders jailing political opponents, like Putin did with Navalny, Carlson threw his own name into the mix.
“There’s a war going on that is resetting the world. I’m not for throwing your political opponents in prison. I hate it. I’m mad that the Biden administration is now doing it,” he said. “I’m worried about it happening to me. I mean, honestly. I want to get that on the record.”
While saying he’s “not a Putin supporter,” Carlson then claimed the war in Ukraine is “crushing the U.S. economy” and took issue with the seizing of yachts and other assets of Russian oligarchs close to Putin.
“Kicking Russia out of SWIFT, stealing people’s stuff—the oligarchs’ stuff, people who had nothing to do with the invasion of Ukraine—that’s not the rules-based order, actually,” he argued. “That’s the hardest-edged-possible politics being played by the U.S. government using the U.S. dollar and the sanctions regimes to do it. What is the message to the rest of the world? Get the hell away from the United States.”
