A former Washington, D.C. police officer who was beaten by rioters during the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol on Tuesday blasted Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) over the House speaker’s decision to exclusively provide a Fox News host with more than 40,000 hours of security footage from the insurrection.
Michael Fanone’s comment came during an appearance on CNN’s The Lead With Jake Tapper in which he appeared alongside former GOP Rep. Adam Kinzinger (IL).
“If there's one thing that Kevin McCarthy has proven is that he is Donald Trump's useful idiot,” said Fanone, who is currently employed by CNN as an on-air contributor.
“He proved it when he went down to Mar-a-Lago with a jar full of Starbursts and he's proving it again by essentially handing over 40,000 hours of security footage from inside the Capitol, unvetted by Capitol Police’s own admission, to a propagandist and an entertainer like Tucker Carlson.”
Fanone believes the purpose behind providing the right-wing outlet with the security footage was to downplay the reality of the attack on the Capitol.
Fanone told Tapper that McCarthy gave the video footage to Fox News “for the sole purpose of creating an alternative narrative to January 6, to best serve Donald Trump and those that would make money off of Donald Trump's grift.”
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Fox News and Fox Business have a long history of promoting outrage over fake "problems" — most notably, the nonexistent War on Christmas. And Fox News' Harris Faulkner was clearly going for maximum outrage when she claimed that people of faith are being persecuted for saying grace in restaurants.
Guest-hosting "Fox News Tonight" on Monday, June 5, Faulkner (who hosts "The Faulkner Focus" during the day) told viewers, "For those of us who believe, we must be bold in our faith right now. When you gather in public spaces, pray thankfully over your food — even when the server gives you the stink eye or tells the manager that your peaceful grace is triggering them."
Faulkner continued, "I had it happen to me. I've been asked to leave a restaurant for openly bowing my head in prayer hands — in America. It's all good. They don't deserve my money anyway."
READ MORE: 'License to lie': Media Matters scorches Fox News' settlement with Dominion
It wasn't long before Twitter users called Faulkner out for trying to drive fake outrage with a non-issue.
Twitter user Isaac Bailey, @ijbailey, posted, "Evidence? I have prayed over my food a thousand times in a thousand restaurants all across this country, and this has not happened to me even once. I haven’t heard it happen to any grace-saying person I know. Name names if this is true."
@Ebyrdstarr posted, "If, IF, there is anything remotely true in this story, I guarantee it was something Faulkner or another member of her party said to the server that led to them being asked to leave."
Twitter user Keith England wrote, "Wonder what her 'prayer hands' have to say about bearing false witness? Funny how conservative 'Christians' all feel perfectly entitled to ignore that particular commandment at will."
READ MORE: Revealed: The text that toppled Tucker Carlson
@GhawinRiver argued, "Here's how I know there's more to this story, if indeed it's not an outright lie. Faulkner is a multimillionaire. If that were even REMOTELY true, she'd be suing, loudly, and publicly, because people that rich can casually do that even if nothing happened, much less if it did."
@GhawinRiver added, "Further, not only would she be suing, every right-wing law firm in the country would be chasing her down and setting off a bidding war to represent her because that'd be an open-shut case and an easy win."
Twitter user @penumbra_w, who is Catholic, did have an unpleasant experience saying grace in a restaurant — only the offenders weren't atheists, but the type of evangelical Christian nationalists Fox News caters to.
@Penumbra_w posted, "This is pure projection. When I was a kid, my Catholic family said grace in a restaurant in Georgia. We were verbally attacked by evangelicals (RIGHT WING NUT JOBS) for making the Sign of the Cross — we were called un-Christian. From then on, we didn't cross ourselves in public."
READ MORE: George Will: Fox News’ $787.5 million Dominion settlement was 'good for the law'
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CNN legal analyst Eli Honig said on Tuesday that he has little doubt the the investigation into former President Donald Trump's handling of top-secret government documents has reached its endgame.
In breaking down the latest news about the investigation, Honig pointed to reports that special counsel Jack Smith was present at a Monday meeting with Trump's lawyers as evidence that a charging decision is coming very soon.
"The fact that Jack Smith was there is really important to me because that tells me that this is it," he said. "Jack Smith is the principal here. I don't think they're likely to give Trump's lawyers a meeting with the attorney general. that's unheard of... Jack Smith will have the crucial decision here... based on my experience, yes, it has to be ending soon. I'm not going to commit to when 'soon' is, but these meetings with defense lawyers happen at the very end."
RELATED: 'Nihilistic moron' Trump heading for another indictment: George Conway
Honig also explained how these meetings between defense lawyers and prosecutors are common, although he cast doubt on the Trump lawyers' chances of success.
"Defense lawyers come in and pitch you," Honig said. "They basically say, 'Prosecutors, these problems with your case, here's why it's a bad idea for you to charge my client.' They don't work often but sometimes they can be useful for prosecutors. I've been talked out of very borderline cases on a few instances."
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George Conway mocked Donald Trump as a "nihilistic moron" for risking years in prison by hoarding classified documents at his private resort at Mar-a-Lago.
The former president appears to be headed toward a second indictment, after he was charged with fraud in Manhattan, and panelists on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" discussed the latest developments in the quickening investigation by special counsel Jack Smith in the Mar-a-Lago case.
"There is a sense of real panic growing at Mar-a-Lago, reflected in Trump's Truth Social tweets but also those even calmer heads in the room say, 'Look, we're concerned, we feel like a charge could be coming.'"
Trump's attorneys met Monday with officials at the Department of Justice to argue against an indictment, and conservative attorney George Conway said that showed an indictment was likely imminent.
FROM EARLIER: William Barr: 'Unguided missile' Rudy Giuliani completely to blame for first Trump impeachment
"We are approaching the very end," Conway said. "I kept hearing this ear worm in my head as I was coming to the studio this morning, 'This is it, make no mistake.' We're getting down to the final strokes of this race, and what's clearly really remarkable about it is that of all the things that this man has done, eight decades of lying and cheating and stealing, this case, this documents case, is probably the easiest, shortest, simplest and yet carries the most severe penalties, likely penalties, of any of the cases, any of the legal issues that he's ever faced."
"Now people will say, you know, he really, in a just world, he would go to jail for what he did on Jan. 6, the weeks approaching Jan. 6," Conway added. "And I kind of agree with that, but for this man who is basically a nihilistic moron, for him to go to jail potentially for a long time, these Espionage Act charges bring very heavy sentences to potentially go to jail for something so pointless and silly and useless as keeping these documents is actually kind of fitting."
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