Fox News host Tucker Carlson accused federal officials of tipping off CNN about the January raid in which longtime President Trump confidant Roger Stone was arrested by the FBI.
The claim received new life Monday evening, days after the “dirty trickster” was found guilty on seven counts for impeding a House investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election.
Carlson contrasted the show of force and media coverage with Stone’s arrest to the “avoid the press” strategy offered to Jeffrey Epstein by a federal prosecutor in 2007 when he was accused of molesting dozens of underage girls.
“Dozens of federal agents with automatic weapons, armored vehicles, and a helicopter descended on his home in a middle-class part of Fort Lauderdale and rousted the 66-year-old and his wife from bed at rifle point,” Carlson said as surveillance footage of the raid played. “Just to make sure the event inflicted maximum humiliation, the feds tipped off CNN, which was there to capture the whole thing live. Which they did.”
Carlson went on to say the media and federal officials have been harsher on Stone, who faces up to 50 years in prison, than they were on Epstein, a wealthy financier who struck a plea agreement in which he served just 13 months in county jail. Epstein was found dead in his jail cell earlier this year while awaiting trial on federal sex trafficking charges.
In the days that followed Stone’s arrest on Jan. 25, Trump, Stone, and others spread claims that CNN was tipped off by federal officials. A CNN camera crew was there to capture the moment just after 6 a.m.
CNN denied being tipped off, insisting it was journalistic intuition and grand jury movement that led to a crew setting up outside Stone’s home. The federal judge presiding over Stone’s case determined in February there was “nothing in the record to substantiate” Stone’s claim that special counsel Robert Mueller’s prosecutors violated a court-ordered seal of his indictment until he was apprehended.
On his show Friday, Carlson pushed Trump to pardon Stone and had as a guest Stone’s daughter, Adria, who called on Trump to “save” her family.
