MSNBC cuts off Josh Hawley to fact-check rant about phone tapping
MSNBC cut away from the grilling of Attorney General Pam Bondi on Tuesday after Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) went on a manic tirade that his phone had been “tapped” by special counsel Jack Smith as part of the Jan. 6th insurrection investigation.
As MSNBC legal analyst Catherine Christian noted during the break, nothing Hawley said was close to the truth.
Given a chance to ask Bondi questions, the Missouri Republican instead used his opening minutes to rant about a new report that the FBI “tapped” the phones of eight sitting U.S. senators during the investigation of Donald Trump.
As Hawley told Bondi, “This isn't hypothetical. This isn't maybe. What will you do in the future? This isn't ‘Oh, gee, can you imagine a situation?’ This happened. This happened and this happened. The targeting of Catholics in this country, because Joe Biden and his FBI didn't like Catholics,” MSNBC host Anna Cabrera cut in.
“Okay, we're just going to pull out for a quick second to do a fact check, because Senator Hawley keeps on bringing up this idea that the FBI tapped their phones related to the Jack Smith investigation into January 6th and 2020 election interference,” she began.
“What we have learned, and the facts of the matter are, that the FBI did request phone logs or data related to a number of senators, GOP senators who had communications on that day on January 6th.”
“And what they asked for was not any information related to a phone tap,” she reported. “It wasn't listening into any content of conversations that they had. In fact, this is according to Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), also a Republican, as he was among those revealing what they had learned. He said that the information was who was called, date, time, length of call; so again, it was not a phone tap.”
Christian agreed and added, “It's probably political posturing.”
“It makes sense that the special counsel would want to know who these particular senators called and who called them during January 4th to January 7th, 2021. And Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) used those dates because that was part of the now dismissed indictment of obstructing that congressional proceeding, the certification of the election. So they were investigating who did president, then-President Trump, speak to.”
She added, “Tap means listening to phone conversations. That's not what happened here.”
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