EVEN THE FOX NETWORK HAS DEBUNKED THE PRESIDENT”S ACCUSATIONS

…Will this organization ever become a trustworthy operation?

 

Fox’s Shepard Smith calls Trump’s accusations against Clinton: “inaccurate”.

 

Anyone that tries to keep up on what’s going on in politics is aware that if you only watch Fox News, you are lucky to get ½ of the real truth.  Now, when a Fox news anchor tries to debunk what his own network has called the “Hillary Clinton Uranium Scandal”, that debunking has totally infuriated the Fox News long-time viewers.

 

So, even when Shepard Smith on Fox tried to tell the truth on Fox, some of the viewers immediately Tweeted that Smith should leave Fox and go to work for CNN or MSNBC.

 

What Smith did was to call President Trump’s accusations against Hillary “inaccurate”, and this triggered calls from some Republicans on Capitol Hill to call for a special counsel to investigate Clinton.

 

Fox News and Trump and all his allies, has been suggesting for months that there was a link between donations to the Clinton Foundation and the approval of a deal by the State Department and the Obama administration.  This link they say allowed a Russian company to purchase a Canada-based mining group with operations in the United States.

 

President Trump has even called it “Watergate, modern-age.”  And former White House adviser Sebastian Gorka, while speaking on Fox News last month, said it was “equivalent to” the Julius and Ethel Rosenberg spying case of the 1950s, in which the couple was charged with providing US atomic secrets to the Soviet Union, noting that “and those people got the chair.”

 

The Fox claim is that the US had lost 20% of its uranium supply because of “the deal”.  This claim has been proven to be wrong, but Fox just keeps sending this bogus information to their viewers.  According to Megan Kelly, now at NBC, but who used to work for Fox, and the Washington Post, they have both reported that the US lost nowhere near to the claimed 20% supply of uranium.  But Fox keeps peddling this fallacy.

 

Various fact-checkers, including those at the Washington Post, have already shown the untrue underpinnings of these accusations against the Clinton Fondation. Obviously, no one has expected to hear a similar debunking from Fox News.

 

But Smith, in his broadcast, made many of the same points as all the fact-checkers.  Smith said that the accusation is that nine people involved in the deal made donations to the Clinton Foundation totaling more than $140 million. This was claimed as being in exchange for those donations, and that the then Secretary of State Clinton approved the sale to the Russians as a quid pro quo.

 

This accusation was first made by Peter Schweizer, the senior editor-at-large of the Alt-Right website Breitbart in his 2015 book “Clinton Cash.” The next year, candidate Donald Trump incorrectly cited the book’s accusation as an example of Clinton’s corruption.

 

But Smith called the statement “inaccurate in a number of ways,” noting that “the Clinton State Department had no power to veto or approve that transaction.” Rather, it must be approved by an interagency committee of the government consisting of nine department heads that included the Secretary of State.

 

Most of the Clinton Foundation donations in question, he pointed out, came from Frank Giustra, the founder of the uranium company in Canada. But Giustra, Smith noted, “sold his stake in the company back in 2007,” that was three years before the uranium/Russia deal and “a year and a half before Hillary Clinton became secretary of state.” He then added: . . . The accusation is predicated on the charge that Secretary Clinton approved the sale. She did not. A committee of nine evaluated the sale, and the president approved the sale,

 

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission and others had to offer the permits, and none of the uranium was exported by the US to Russia.

 

Smith has deviated from Fox and Trump’s bogus comments before, to the point that his Fox colleague, Sean Hannity once accused him of being “anti-Trump.”

 

But the day after Smith’s comments on the false claim, Twitter went crazy with outrage from people who appeared to share Hannity’s former view of Smith being “anti-Trump.”

 

The sense of betrayal among some Fox viewers was similar to sentiments expressed this week about Fox’s Hannity, after he stopped defending Republican Alabama US Senate candidate Roy Moore.  Even Sean Hannity has had it with Roy Moore as Hannity gave him 24 hours to explain his ‘inconsistencies.’  Hannity actually gave Moore 24 hours to explain what Hannity called the inconsistencies in his responses to accusations of sexual misconduct with teenage girls when Moore was in his early 30s.

 

It was however seriously refreshing to have someone on the less-than-honest Fox Network actually give their viewers a slice of the truth, regardless of what kind of foul responses the truth brought to the Fox network and to Mr. Smith.

 

Don’t get me wrong.  I still have no hope for the Fox operation to ever become an honest network.

 

Copyright G.Ater  2017