The hosts of “Morning Joe” had some strong words for Fox News and other conservative media outlets on Tuesday, calling some of their recent coverage “willfully stupid” and “deliberately lying.”
Their words came on the heels of Fox News’ reporting on a recent “conflict of interest” motion filing from Special Counselor John Durham, a US attorney appointed to the position by Bill Barr just weeks before Trump left office, which alleges that lawyers for Hillary Clinton’s campaign “infiltrated” computer servers at Trump Tower and the White House, in an effort to fabricate a link between the former president and Russia.
But, for the hosts of “Morning Joe,” the filing — the claims of which have been largely debunked by the New York Times and NBC News — is absolute nonsense.
“It is so confounding and so hard to follow,” Joe Scarborough said. “This pleading, which is indecipherable unless you have an agenda and you want to shoot first and ask questions later, which is what they did legally. This is as confusing as the initial story. I remember when the initial story came out and I read through it and I was like, what? Everybody did. That’s why nobody paid attention to it the first time because it was so convoluted looking about DNS lookups.”
MSNBC journalist John Heilemann targeted Fox News’s coverage of this story directly, saying, “one of the things about this is there’s this willful or either incredibly stupid or willful misconstruing of what this is all about.”
But Scarborough took it one further. “Can I just say, willfully stupid? A lot of people being willfully stupid,” he added.
The hosts then argued that some of the Fox News hosts that have been covering the report are probably aware of its validity. “They know that they’re lying to their audience, that they’re liars, and they’re deliberately lying about that,” Scarborough said.