How the media use Fox News

Bret Baier: "The President Obama documents were handled properly" pic.twitter.com/RSSEdg8DpS

— Justin Baragona (@justinbaragona) August 12, 2022

For the past quarter-century, the mainstream press has treated Fox News as a red-haired stepchild. The media ignorantly mocks a channel that not only beats all its cable news competitors but all the cable outlets. 

But they also use Fox to validate their talking points whenever a Fox host repeats their lies.

Shep Smith was long praised as a rare real journalist at Fox because he said the same things that are not true that the rest of the media say.

Of course, when he left Fox he was of no use to them. He had to settle for a downtime slot at CNBC. He really isn't that good. 

With Shep and Chris Wallace gone, the media was having trouble, what a sad, sad story. They needed a new Fox host to restore their former glory. Where, oh where was he? Where could that man be?

Well now it's showtime for Bret Baier and the media. Winter for The Donald and France.

Newsweek reported, "Fox News anchor Bret Baier refuted suggestions promoted by Donald Trump and a fellow Fox News personality that former President Barack Obama had mishandled 33 million documents, including classified materials."

Refuted?

Someone needs to look that word up.

The story said, "Baier on Friday rejected the comparison during a Fox News segment, saying that while Obama had relocated the documents, that action had followed the legal process. In Trump's case, the legal process does not appear to have been followed, although the former president and his attorneys contend he declassified the materials before leaving the White House."

Hmm.

Baier said, "There is a process. President Obama, according to NARA and that statement and everything we know, followed the processes to get those documents to Chicago. There was, you know, a lot of grumbling that they hadn't been posted online as promised but how they were handled was done by that process."

That's not much of a rebuttal. Definitely it is not a refutation. 

Elsewhere in Newsweek, Mike Davis showed Baier is talking out of  the orifice he sits on. Davis is a former chief counsel for nominations to then-Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley. He said no process is needed.

Davis wrote, "All presidents take mementos and other records when they leave office. They don't pack their own boxes. The National Archives takes the position that almost everything is a 'presidential record.' And the federal government, in general, over-classifies almost everything.

"Even if Trump took classified records, that isn't a crime. The president has the inherent constitutional power to declassify any record he wants, in any manner he wants, regardless of any otherwise-pertinent statute or regulation that applies to everyone else. The president does not need to obtain Congress' or a bureaucrat's permission—or jump through their regulatory or statutory hoops—to declassify anything. The Supreme Court reaffirmed this in the 1988 case, Department of the Navy v. Egan: 'The President, after all, is the 'Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States.' U.S. Const., Art. II, § 2. His authority to classify and control access to information bearing on national security...flows primarily from this constitutional investment of power in the President, and exists quite apart from any explicit congressional grant.'

"Thus, if Trump left the White House with classified records, then those records are necessarily declassified by his very actions. He doesn't need to label that decision for, or report that decision to, any bureaucrat who works for him. It is pretextual legal nonsense for the Biden Justice Department to pretend Trump broke any criminal statute. Indeed, it is noteworthy that Attorney General Garland apparently did not seek an opinion from the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel (OLC)—the de facto general counsel for the executive branch—before ordering this home raid of his boss's chief political enemy. Perhaps Garland knew OLC wouldn't give him the answer he wanted."

In short, nothing at Mar-a-Lago was classified information because as president, Trump had the power to de-classify anything he sent to Mar-a-Lago.

Thus the hunt for classified documents was bogus.

I saw that on Day One in Poca, West Virginia. Surely someone much better looking, better educated and better groomed like Bret Baier saw it in Washington.

But he's the new Chris Wallace and he must at every opportunity say the walls are closing in on Trump.

That way Bret Baier will maintain his status as the one Real Journalist at Fox.