As President Donald Trump and his administration navigated the Ukraine saga at the heart of his recent impeachment, the president was—unsurprisingly—helped out tremendously by Fox News, whose programming has largely pushed the Trump administration’s false narrative that the president did nothing wrong and Joe Biden is the one whose Ukraine dealings actually deserve scrutiny. While the president can always depend on hosts like Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson to back him up, though, the network has also long enlisted a series of MAGA-friendly guests to push Trump’s preferred Ukraine claims, from the president’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani to conservative attorneys Victoria Toensing and Joe diGenova. But these guests aren’t exactly trustworthy sources—and even Fox News knows it.
The Daily Beast reported Thursday on the existence of an internal Fox News memo, which centers on the Ukraine timeline and the misinformation surrounding it—and pointedly criticizes several longtime Fox News guests who have spread these lies. The 162-page research briefing book, titled “Ukraine, Disinformation, & the Trump Administration” and written by Fox News senior political affairs specialist Bryan S. Murphy, “openly questions” the credibility of Fox News guests Toensing, diGenova, Giuliani, and former Hill columnist John Solomon, who has since become a Fox News contributor. The briefing book accuses Solomon—whom Media Matters noted in December had appeared on Fox more than 90 times since March—of propagating the Ukraine smear campaign meant to denigrate Trump’s political rivals. “John Solomon played an indispensable role in the collection and domestic publication of elements of this disinformation campaign,” the briefing book notes.
The Fox News document was also not kind to frequent guest Giuliani, the presidential lawyer whose quest to dig up damaging dirt in Ukraine for Trump is at the heart of the whole impeachment mess. Murphy notes in the memo that Giuliani has a “high susceptibility to disinformation,” and emphasizes “the extensive role played by Rudy Giuliani and his associates, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, in spreading disinformation.” Also under fire in the memo are married couple Toensing and diGenova, who worked with Giuliani on his Ukraine crusade and represent indicted Ukrainian oligarch Dmytro Firtash, who served as one of the sources feeding information to Giuliani and Solomon. The lawyers, however, conveniently neglected to note these ties to Firtash in their frequent Fox News appearances defending the president and discussing the oligarch. In the memo, Murphy asks his Fox News colleagues to consider the couple’s failure to disclose their conflict of interest, and suggests that Fox employees should focus on the pair’s “non-disclosure of financial motives and representation of Firtash while spreading false and misleading stories.”
In addition to openly targeting the network’s own guests as disseminators of disinformation, the briefing book also takes actual moments of Fox News’s coverage to task. While the document criticizes the media more broadly, noting how “unnamed ‘U.S. media’ outlets played a role in the ‘amplification of disinformation stories from clearly unreliable sources and non-disclosure of conflicts by guests,’” the Daily Beast reports that the briefing book’s timeline largely focuses on appearances made on Fox News. Hannity, unsurprisingly, was a particularly frequent offender, continually referring to Solomon as an “investigative journalist” when the Hill has explicitly labeled Solomon’s work as “opinion,” and failing to mention that Toensing and diGenova worked for Firtash when the pair appeared on his show to talk about an affidavit filed on the oligarch’s behalf.
Fox News claims that the briefing book is being mischaracterized, telling the Daily Beast in a statement that the document “is nothing more than a comprehensive chronological account of what every person involved in the Ukraine controversy was doing at any identifiable point in time, including tracking media appearances of major players who appeared on Fox News and in many other outlets.” “The 200 page document has thousands of data points and the vast majority have no relation to Fox News—instead it’s now being taken out of context and politicized to damage the network,” Mitch Kweit, senior vice president of the Brain Room at Fox News, said in the statement.