The Justice Department said a CNN journalist’s claim that Attorney General William Barr attempted to “muzzle” Fox News legal analyst Judge Andrew Napolitano is false.
Kerri Kupec, a DOJ spokeswoman, responded Saturday evening to a claim in CNN chief media correspondent Brian Stelter’s forthcoming book that Barr met with billionaire and media mogul Rupert Murdoch as part of efforts to silence Napolitano while he publicly called for President Trump to be impeached during Congress’s Ukraine-related investigation.
“This is false. A basic fact-check would have revealed that, but @brianstelter did not reach out to us before publishing,” Kupec tweeted.
This is false. A basic fact-check would have revealed that, but @brianstelter did not reach out to us before publishing.https://t.co/OWgCWX3aFg
— Kerri Kupec DOJ (@KerriKupecDOJ) August 23, 2020
In the book, Stelter writes that an unnamed source told him that Trump “was so incensed by the judge’s TV broadcasts that he had implored Barr to send Rupert a message in person … about ‘muzzling the judge’. [Trump] wanted the nation’s top law enforcement official to convey just how atrocious Napolitano’s legal analysis had been.”
The attorney general’s words “carried a lot of weight,” Stelter wrote in Hoax: Donald Trump, Fox News and the Dangerous Distortion of Truth, but neither Murdoch nor anyone else was “explicitly told to take Napolitano off the air.”
Napolitano was outspoken both during the president’s impeachment trial and after, writing in a Fox News op-ed that the Senate’s vote to acquit him was a “legal assault on the Constitution.”
“Federal law prohibits such solicitation as criminal and prohibits government officials from seeking personal favors in return for performing their governmental duties. The latter is bribery. Because the solicitation that Trump committed was a crime against the government, it is among those referred to when the Constitution was written as a ‘high’ crime. High crimes are a constitutional basis for impeachment, along with bribery and treason,” Napolitano wrote.
