On Wednesday evening, Fox News Special Report anchor Bret Baier led off his show with explosive breaking news revealing an extensive ongoing FBI investigation into the corruption scandals swirling around Hillary Clinton, with bureau agents looking into everything from newly discovered e-mails to pay for play allegations against the Clinton Foundation. Despite the bombshell coming just days before election day, the broadcast networks have yet to touch the story.
Baier informed viewers:
Breaking news tonight, two separate sources with intimate knowledge of the FBI investigations into the Clinton e-mails and the Clinton Foundation tell Fox the following. The investigation into the Clinton Foundation, looking into possible pay for play interaction between Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the Foundation, has been going on for more than a year. Led by the white collar crime division public corruption branch of the criminal investigative division of the FBI. The Clinton Foundation investigation is a, quote, “very high priority.”
Moments later, he added: “Meantime, the classified e-mail investigation is being run by the national security division of the FBI. They are currently combing through former Democratic Congressman Anthony Weiner's laptop and have found e-mails that they believe came from Hillary Clinton's server that also appear to be new, as in not duplicates.”
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Instead of providing wall to wall coverage of the serious investigation being far from closed, the ABC, NBC, and CBS morning shows on Thursday devoted air time to President Obama bashing FBI director James Comey for daring to reopen the e-mail investigation.
On ABC’s Good Morning America, political analyst Matthew Dowd noted: “But the one thing we don't know is what happened last week with the Comey announcement was something could happen....So anything can happen in that regard.” Seemingly oblivious to the breaking news, co-host George Stephanopoulos replied: “See if some big news comes out.”
During an 8 a.m. news brief, anchor Amy Robach declared: “President Obama continues to lead rallies for Clinton in North Carolina and Florida and he made his first public comments on the FBI investigation into Clinton's e-mails, saying, quote, ‘We don't operate on innuendo and leaks.’”
On NBC’s Today, correspondent Andrea Mitchell similarly promoted the President’s criticism of the law enforcement agency: “Clinton now trying to avoid talking about her recent e-mail controversy. But for the first time, President Obama taking a swipe at his FBI director, James Comey.” A soundbite ran of Obama lecturing: “There is a norm that when there are investigations we don't operate on innuendo, we don’t operate on incomplete information, we don’t operate on leaks, we operate based on concrete decisions that are made.”
On CBS This Morning, co-host Gayle King proclaimed: “President Obama appeared to criticize the FBI director's handling of the newly discovered e-mails linked to Hillary Clinton. The president said, yesterday, that investigations should not operate on, quote, ‘incomplete information.’” In the report that followed, correspondent Nancy Cordes teed up a clip of Obama scolding the FBI: “In an interview, President Obama criticized the FBI director for alerting Congress about new e-mails that may or may not be significant.”
Cordes concluded: “Up until now, the White House has taken pains not to look like it's taking sides in this fight between the campaign and the FBI, but the President went a different route, saying that the FBI already concluded this summer that Clinton made a mistake by using a private server but didn't do anything criminal.”
The reporting by Fox News flies directly in the face of such assertions.
While the networks were unwilling to report on the Democratic nominee being embroiled in a criminal investigation, back in 2000, the same media were eager to hype a decades-old DWI charge against then-Republican nominee George W. Bush as a November surprise designed to damage the candidate.
All three broadcast morning shows led with the news of a George Bush drunk driving arrest 24 years earlier, with CBS and NBC devoting nearly all of the 7am half hour to it. Questions were raised about the political agenda of the source, but on at least the ET versions of the morning shows none revealed that the lawyer who fed the story was not only a Democratic convention delegate, but was a 1998 Democratic candidate for Governor of Maine.
Here is a transcript of Baier’s report at the top of the November 2 Special Report:
6:00 PM ET
BRET BAIER: This is a Fox News alert. I'm Bret Baier in Washington. Breaking news tonight, two separate sources with intimate knowledge of the FBI investigations into the Clinton e-mails and the Clinton Foundation tell Fox the following. The investigation into the Clinton Foundation, looking into possible pay for play interaction between Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the Foundation, has been going on for more than a year. Led by the white collar crime division public corruption branch of the criminal investigative division of the FBI. The Clinton Foundation investigation is a, quote, “very high priority.”
Agents have interviewed and re-interviewed multiple people about the Foundation case and even before the Wikileaks dumps, these sources said agents had collected a great deal of evidence. Pressed on that, one source said, quote, “a lot of it.” And there is an avalanche of new information coming in every day. Some of it from Wikileaks, some from new e-mails. The agents are actively and aggressively pursuing this case and they will be going back and interviewing the same people again, some for the third time.
As a result of the limited immunity deals to a number of top aides, including Cheryl Mills and Heather Samuelson, the Justice Department had tentatively agreed that the FBI would destroy those laptops after a narrow review. We are told definitively that has not happened and those devices are currently in the FBI field office here in Washington, D.C. and are being exploited. The source points out any immunity deal is null and void if any subject has lied at any point in the investigation.
Meantime, the classified e-mail investigation is being run by the national security division of the FBI. They are currently combing through former Democratic Congressman Anthony Weiner's laptop and have found e-mails that they believe came from Hillary Clinton's server that also appear to be new, as in not duplicates. Whether they contain classified material or not is not yet known, but will likely be known soon. All of this just as we move inside one week until Election Day.
(...)
