CNN’s “New Day” host, Chris Cuomo, blasted Republicans on Monday for spewing “crap” by questioning special counsel Robert Mueller’s integrity.
Not to be outdone, MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” host, Joe Scarborough, accused Fox News of “fomenting a constitutional crisis” that could “lead to violence.”
The two media figures were extremely upset when Trump administration officials and advocates pressed their concerns about the impartiality of Mueller’s probe into Russia’s interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Those concerns intensified after reports revealed that FBI agent Peter Strzok, a former team member of Mueller’s probe, exchanged anti-Trump text messages.
As a result, Scarborough and Cuomo lashed out at Fox News and Republicans for engaging in “irresponsible” criticism by talking about “coups” against Trump.
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While interviewing former Trump campaign adviser Michael Caputo, Cuomo declared, “You know, you don’t have to tell people that they’re like the KGB. That’s a lot of crap coming out of people on your side of the fence. You don’t want to undermine the FBI, do you?”
Cuomo then asked, “I get that it works politically, but are you a little concerned that this heavy-handed offensive against the FBI and Mueller could come back to bite you guys? I mean, you are trying to undermine confidence in some of the main institutions of our democracy.”
When Scarborough’s co-host, Mika Brzezinski, asked him about “the president’s network” and its take on the Mueller controversy, he replied, “They are literally — and it’s very dangerous, because blood will be on the hands of people that whip people into a frenzy and lie.”
Scarborough continued, “But they are saying there’s a coup going on right now, which is one of the most extraordinarily irresponsible things I have heard a major network do,” adding that such reporting “leads to people getting killed” in an anti-government coup.
Scarborough warned that any criticism against Mueller and his team’s impartiality in investigating Trump and his officials could “attach to somebody like Timothy McVeigh, and they will take action and, yes, we will know who put those diseased thoughts in their heads, saying that the Federal Bureau of Investigation was launching a coup against an elected president.”
McVeigh was convicted and executed for detonating a truck bomb at the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995, killing 168 people, including 19 children, and injuring more than 600.
Related: FBI Text Messages Give Ammunition to Trump, GOP
“Fox News, let me say this — they are fomenting a constitutional crisis by suggesting to people watching Fox News in middle America that somebody is attempting a coup, a coup against our government,” Scarborough said. “But what they are doing could lead to violence, and what they are doing is about as deeply irresponsible as anything I’ve ever seen.”
“Derangement Syndrome,” today applied to the president’s critics as Trump Derangement Syndrome, is a term frequently used in the media to describe individuals who become so emotionally upset about an individual or policy that their criticism becomes unbalanced and even disconnected from reality.
The term originated during the tenure of President George W. Bush by conservative commentators — and was then adopted by liberal defenders of President Barack Obama to characterize his critics on the Right.
PoliZette writer Kathryn Blackhurst can be reached at [email protected]. Follow her on Twitter here.
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