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Attorney General William Barr told Rupert Murdoch to “muzzle” Andrew Napolitano, a prominent Fox News personality who has become a critic of Donald Trump, according to a new book on the right-wing television network.
Barr’s meeting with Murdoch, at the media mogul’s home in New York City in October 2019, was widely reported at the time, with speculation surrounding it. According to Hoax: Donald Trump, Fox News and the Dangerous Distortion of Truth, by CNN reporter Brian Stelter, topics covered included media consolidation and criminal justice reform.
“But that was also Judge Andrew Napolitano.”
Stelter’s in-depth look at Fox News, his fortune under Trump and his ties to his White House will be released on Tuesday. The guard got a copy.
In early 2019, it was reported that Napolitano, a New Jersey superior court judge who joined Fox News in 1998, told friends he was on Trump’s shortlist to the Supreme Court. But he broke ranks later in the year, calling Trump’s approaches to Ukraine, seeking political filth on his rivals, “both criminal and ungodly behavior.”
“The criminal behavior to which Trump has admitted,” Napolitano wrote in an Oct. 3 column, “is far more serious than anything alleged or discovered by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, and much of what Mueller revealed was uneasy.
Quoting an anonymous source, Stelter writes that Trump “was so angered by the judge’s television shows that he begged Barr to send Rupert a message in person … about” muzzling the judge. ” [Trump] wanted the country’s top law enforcement official to convey how excruciating Napolitano’s legal analysis had been.
Barr has been widely accused of flouting the rule of law, serving Trump and his own authoritarian view of the presidency.
Although Barr’s words to Murdoch “carried a lot of weight,” writes Stelter, “no one has been explicitly told to take Napolitano off the air.” Instead, Stelter reports, Napolitano found digital resources allocated elsewhere, saw a slot on a daytime show disappear, and was not included in coverage of the impeachment process.
In Stelter’s account, Napolitano believed he was being sidelined by “25-year-old producers” who didn’t believe viewers could handle his analysis. Stelter, however, says that a “twenty-five-year-old staff member” confirmed that a host, Maria Bartiromo, would only reserve Napolitano to discuss non-Trump matters, as he would upset Bartiromo too much if he criticized the President.
Fox News audiences, of course, remain loyal to Trump as his re-election campaign continues. Some Fox employees, writes Stelter, “justified the bench by saying that viewers hated him: ‘Why are we going to book someone who kills our ratings? “”
Napolitano continued to appear on Fox News and publish opinion columns. He remained critical of Trump, criticizing, for example, the actions of federal agents sent to confront protesters in Portland, Oregon; oppose attempts at coronavirus relief without congressional participation; and saying Senate Republicans should have called new witnesses in the president’s impeachment trial.
He also had harsh words for Barr, for example calling his conduct in the case of Trump’s ally of Roger Stone “Stalinist”; explode his handling of the Mueller report to Trump’s advantage; and hit him for “insulting” Congress.
Napolitano, however, supported Barr’s attempt to drop charges against Michael Flynn, Trump’s first national security adviser who pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about contacts with Russian officials.
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