Fox News host Tucker Carlson divided supporters of Donald Trump by on Thursday calling out one of the president’s campaign lawyers over her claims of electoral fraud.
The windup: Carlson dedicated his show’s opening monologue to a news conference hours earlier during which a Trump campaign legal team laid out its case that the 2020 election had been “rigged” to stop the president from winning.
According to Carlson, Rudy Giuliani, the head of the team and Trump’s personal attorney, had “raised legitimate questions” about fraudulent ballots and vote-counting and had “pointed to what appeared to be real wrongdoing.”
Carlson also said he took seriously allegations by Trump campaign lawyer Sidney Powell that voting machines provided by a company called Dominion has been used to change millions of votes for the president and to swing the election for Democrat Joe Biden.
- “What Powell was describing would amount to the single greatest crime in American history,” Carlson said. “Democracy destroyed. The end of our centuries-old system of self-government.”
The call-out: However, Carlson went on to fault Powell for allegedly declining his repeated “polite requests” to provide proof of her allegations or to appear on his popular show, “Tucker Carlson Tonight.”
- “When we kept pressing, she got angry and told us to stop contacting her. When we checked with others around the Trump campaign, people in positions of authority, they told us Powell has never given them any evidence either. Nor did she provide any today at the press conference,” Carlson said.
- “Powell did say that electronic voting is dangerous, and she’s right. We’re with here there. But she never demonstrated that a single actual vote was moved illegitimately by software from one candidate to another. Not one.”
Carlson said he was publicly challenging Powell for proof because “the truth” is ultimately “all that matters” and the key to restoring faith in American democracy.
- “It’s our only hope. It’s our best defense. And it’s how we’re different from them. We care what’s true, and we know you care, too. That’s why we told you,” he said.
- Carlson did not directly address Trump’s promotion of similar conspiracy theories about Dominion or about other supposed efforts to steal the election from him.
The reaction: Late on Thursday night, Powell, a former federal prosecutor, hit back at Carlson in a statement to the Washington Examiner.
- She also retweeted, and then deleted, a post that said, “Tonight Tucker threw one of his Fox Globalist directed temper tantrums.”
In an appearance on Fox Business on Wednesday morning, Powell denied to host Maria Bartiromo that she had responded angrily to Carlson’s requests for evidence, saying she had in fact offered him a relevant affidavit and expert witness.
- “But he was very insulting, demanding, and rude, and I told him not to contact me again, in those terms,” Powell added.
Some pro-Trump commentators sided with Powell against Carlson, who is generally supportive of the president, suggesting the host was trying to play the role of a judge or had somehow been “compromised” along with Fox News.
Dinesh D’Souza was among those who continued to back Powell and the Trump legal team.
Others on the right, though, including The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh, seconded Carlson’s critique of Powell and vouched for his character.
Several Republican elected officials also voiced criticism of the Trump campaign after the lawyers’ news conference, which featured a number of unsupported, inaccurate and inflated statements.
- “To insinuate that Republican and Democratic candidates paid to throw off this election is absolutely outrageous,” Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa — who does not yet acknowledge Biden as president-elect — told Fox News’ Guy Benson on Thursday night.
- “I’ve worn our nation’s uniform to protect the values and freedoms that our nation espouses and to have that accusation just offhandedly thrown out there just to confuse our voters across the United States, I think that is absolutely wrong.”
