Fox News host Laura Ingraham found herself in the middle of a sticky situation with former President Donald Trump when he launched into another rant about the 2020 election being “stolen” on her program The Ingraham Angle. That forced her to awkwardly cut him right off since this is some of the same rhetoric that Fox News and several on-air personalities wound up being faced with a lawsuit alleging defamation earlier this year, Mediaite [1] reports.
That lawsuit, a $2.7 billion whopper filed [2] by Smartmatic Voting Systems alleged that Fox News, Lou Dobbs, Maria Bartiromo, Jeanine Pirro, and pro-Trump lawyers Rudy Giuliani, and Sidney Powell participated in a “disinformation campaign” that defamed the company.
While Fox News denied Smartmatic’s allegations, the cable news channel did respond to a letter from the company that demanded a retraction and an apology in the form of a fact-check on Dobbs, Pirro, and Bartiromo’s shows.
In all likelihood, Ingraham was trying to avoid having to impose another awkward fact-check for her own show. Obviously, that left her with little choice but to interrupt Trump mid-rant.
She decided to ask Trump his thoughts about H.R.1 [3] and various election laws currently being debated in states nationwide.
Unsurprisingly, he denounced H.R.1, otherwise known as the For The People Act, as “Democrats trying to get something with no voter I.D., no signature verification, send all the ballots you can,” and adding “you will never have another fair election in this country.”
“Just like, if you look at the last election, it was disgraceful,” Trump said, describing it as a “third-world election,” and a “disgrace.”
Then he excoriated the Supreme Court, saying the justices “should be ashamed of themselves for refusing to overturn the election for him.”
Because that’s the kind of world Trump lives in. The nation’s highest court should bow and scrape to him. And of course, he wasn’t content to leave things at that.
“What they did was absolutely disgraceful, and if you look at the numbers, the numbers were vastly in favor of us in the presidential election,” he said. “It was disgraceful that they were able to get away — the Supreme Court did not have the courage to do what they had to do.”
That left Ingraham fumbling for a moment or two.
“Mr. …yeah, well…” Ingraham interrupted, as Trump began to wind up into his election fraud/Supreme Court rant.
“Speaking as a lawyer, we are not going to relitigate the past tonight,” Ingraham, an alum of the University of Virginia School of Law, added. “But speaking as a lawyer, I think, going forward, I think any candidate running for office has to have an impeccable legal strategy in place before — like come along before the election takes place because a lot of people saw a lot of problems coming, verification problems, but I don’t think the legal situation was in place, and that hurts everybody along the way.”
Trump didn’t seem deterred by that, however.
“No, the courts did not want to enforce it,” he said. “You know that Laura. You know exactly that. And the Supreme Court, when you had Texas and 18 states, the Supreme Court said they don’t have standing. The Supreme Court didn’t want to hear it.”
“A lot of Republicans on that court,” Ingraham said in response.
“They didn’t have the courage to do what they had to do,” Trump the broken record replied.
Apparently, Trump is going to beat this dead horse forever.
Here’s the clip below.
After Trump begins to go deep on the Big Lie, Laura Ingraham desperately tries to steer him away:
"Speaking as a lawyer, we are not going to relitigate the past tonight…" pic.twitter.com/FU7k5TcPrh [4]
— Justin Baragona (@justinbaragona) March 26, 2021 [5]