Shocker: Fox News says Donald Trump will be indicted
Now that the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York has formally accused Donald Trump of committing two felonies, pundits left and right are debating whether he’ll be impeached and removed over it. In a shocker, Fox News now says it believes Trump will indeed be indicted.
Fox News pundit Andrew McCarthy says that he expects the SDNY to criminally indict Donald Trump on the two felonies in question, which center around Trump’s decision to order Michael Cohen to illegally buy the silence of his mistresses during the election. This comes just days after Fox legal analyst Judge Napolitano said he expects Donald Trump Jr to be indicted, and Fox host Tucker Carlson labeled Donald Trump a failure as president. So what’s going on here?
Fox News is all about ratings, not political ideology. It’s just that its business model is built around using propaganda to con the most gullible of conservatives into staying tuned in. Fox has only been pro-Trump because that’s where the bulk of its viewers have wanted it to be. But if Fox executives believe Trump is about to become so criminally exposed that even its viewers are going to lose hope and give up on him, it would make business sense for Fox to tell its pundits to begin turning against Trump. Last week Palmer Report suggested keeping an eye on this trend at Fox, and sure enough, Andrew McCarthy is escalating it significantly.
The interesting part here is that McCarthy’s legal analysis is largely sound. He acknowledges that there is a DOJ guideline against indicting a sitting president, but he points out – as Palmer Report has many times – that it’s absolutely not a law or even a binding rule. Still he’s not sure if SDNY will seek to indict Trump now, or wait until he’s gone from office.
It’s worth pointing out that the mistress payoffs represent no more than about 5% of the criminal cheating and rigging that Donald Trump did during the election, and no more than about 1% of the overall felony charges he’ll end up facing for a lifetime of crime. So if SDNY indicts him while he’s still in office, it’ll be something of a sideshow – but it could help legally establish that Trump can be indicted by Robert Mueller for his more serious crimes.
