'There is indeed a witch hunt, and it’s led by Fox against Robert Mueller.'
Former Fox News contributor Ralph Peters, the network’s sole Russia expert, says he was deliberately excluded from segments on Russia because he didn’t show unwavering support for Trump.
Peters, a retired Army lieutenant colonel who left Fox News earlier this month, made the comments in a Washington Post op-ed published Friday.
Slamming Fox for the direction of its coverage, Peters said the network has become Trump’s personal propaganda outlet, “preach[ing] paranoia, attacking processes and institutions vital to our republic and challenging the rule of law.”
According to Peters, he stopped being invited to appear on segments about Russia “as word spread [at Fox] that I would not unswervingly support President Trump and, worse, that I believed an investigation into Russian interference was essential to our national security.”
“I was the one person on the Fox payroll who, trained in Russian studies and the Russian language, had been face to face with Russian intelligence officers in the Kremlin and in far-flung provinces,” Peters wrote.
Yet, because his support for Trump wasn’t sufficient for Fox News, he was blocked from discussing the very issues about which he could offer his expertise.
“I could only rarely and briefly comment on the paramount security question of our time: whether Putin and his security services ensnared the man who would become our president,” Peters wrote.
Things got even worse “as indictments piled up,” he added. At that point, Fox would not even let him discuss “the mechanics of how the Russians work…”
Peters emphasized that all Americans should want to know the answers to the questions that special counsel Robert Mueller is investigating — namely, “whether a hostile power has our president and those close to him in thrall.”
But instead of delivering the news, Fox has peddled misinformation and conspiracy theories about the Russia probe, run interference for Trump, and spearheaded the smear campaign against those trying to get to the truth.
And that, Peters said, is exactly why he left the network.
“Listening to political hacks with no knowledge of things Russian tell the vast Fox audience that the special counsel’s investigation was a ‘witch hunt,’ while I could not respond, became too much to bear,” he wrote.
“There is indeed a witch hunt,” he added, “and it’s led by Fox against Robert Mueller.”
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