Last Sunday, Fox News personality Tucker Carlson asked his panel if House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes or Mark Meadows, the chair of the House Freedom Caucus and the president of the group, should resign after the latter refused to refer “Russian dossier author” Christopher Steele to special counsel Robert Mueller for questioning.
“Why are they even in congress? Because they’re not ‘patriots,’ they’re partisans. They would sabotage this investigation, for which [Trump and Nunes] must take primary responsibility,” Carlson said, ranting that the Republicans on the committee were “covering up for a rogue president.” He then offered the panel members a “patriotic choice”—commissioner of the Washington, D.C. police department, Ron Davis.
At the time, as Carlson noted, Davis used to work for the FBI and helped set up the FBI’s Mueller Investigation. He also presided over a sting operation that took down a one-time Democratic Party national chairman’s campaign for Congress.
And as Fox News senior White House correspondent John Roberts noted on his regular 9 a.m. show on Tuesday, three FOX News contributors have now resigned in the wake of Carlson’s “Patriot Purge” Special.
First out the door was Michael Reagan, son of former president Ronald Reagan, who called Carlson’s remarks a “soft-core far-right far-right conspiracy theory.”
“I’m not going to go around attempting to take on and expose the truth about those who seek to obscure it,” he said in a statement to Talking Points Memo.
Daniel Horowitz, another conservative columnist whose sole network gig was on @TheRealGaribaldi, also resigned after his return from a vacation. Horowitz had also dubbed Carlson’s “Patriot Purge” Special a “game of gotcha” that his “ego will allow me to do, but loyalty [is] above that.”
Harold Ford, Jr., a former Democratic congressman who also went on The Pursuit of Truth to protest against Tucker Carlson, called him a “conservative rogue and self-serving deviant” in a lengthy Twitter statement on Tuesday. He left Fox News in 2006 after disagreeing with the network’s reporting on Hurricane Katrina and the 2006 presidential election.
Numerous network anchors and pundits also slammed Carlson, including Hannity, who said on his show on Monday that “when you take that position about ‘let’s get rid of Mueller,’ you’ve thrown the game. You’ve thrown the game.”