distinctions i think that s one of the biggest problems. you need to be able to make distinctions very clearly, but he struggled with his speech, he struggled all week with. and if you can t do that to turn and let that semi-fascist record, as john harwood said on cnn, say that that s important and journalists should be able to say that s the right thing, that s ridiculous to me. howard: laura fink p i m guessing you liked the speech, but what about media conservatives who say he s abandoning his campaign theme and presidential theme of unifying the country? i think that s a great question, howie, and i ll tell you this: we re not talking about half the country as hannity suggested. when you do the numbers and the math on the polling, talking about people that rejected the legitimacy of the 2020 election. while that is a significant number of republicans, it s about a 15% of the country. so if you want to talk about unity, biden is trying to unify the 85% of country that want to be
clear reason, you know, or that you can find a motive, and she s right because once you go through that, you can t wave your hand at, you know, the inconsistent application of law, howard. you can t wave your hand at that because what you re left with at the end of that is that it was done, you re left by process of elimination for political purposes. you re done because it affects a political outcome. now, maybe real quick, howard, maybe you re right and i m wrong. guess what, fbi? you have a heavy burden of proof to shoulder. you better come out with the nuclear secrets. howard: well, i would just add that if former president trump wanted to declassify it, he has to tell somebody. there s a process, and so far nobody has said, yes that s a constitutional question. howard: liz, news reports say merrick garland, the attorney general, spent weeks deciding whether or not to go ahead with this court-approved search during which liberals in the media denounced him as being too passiv
the day, the media shouldn t be having a campaign for or against any candidate. they should be reporting the facts, and the facts are, like you said, the numbers in this new york times poll are worrisome for those who want biden or for those who want trump. and at the end of the day, donald trump and joe biden aren t going to do what the polls tell them to do. they re going to do what they want to do. howard: war on white guys. i guess nobody defends if old white guys these days. so, ben, some media conservatives say the press protected him but, of course, it was a covid campaign where he could just kind of do it from his basement. what accounts for the vehemence with which the the media, whether you think this is an orchestrated campaign or not, is have turned on the president they hailed in 2020 because he was their ticket for getting trump out of the white house in. look, i think a lot of the media put themselves out there making the argument that he was a return to normalcy, stab
president should have conceded the election and not done what he did. to get that, i guess, under oath is newsworthy but not huge news. i also thought it was interesting to see the former campaign manager for the president basically admitting openly in a text exchange that president trump s rhetoric was responsible for the riot at capitol. that was also interesting. but in terms of new news value, i think this one, to your point correctly, howie, you said this one wasn t that much of a bombshell compared to some soft to the previous iterations. howard: you re referring to brad pass corral who felt he felt guilty helping trump win after january 6th. laura, media conservatives pushed back after the more dramatic cassidy hutchinson hearing but mostly ignored this one. for media people who talk about and care about processes and very highly partisan committees, it s been packaged that way and
at i.c.e has been charged with this despicable crime. some media conservatives had called the story questionable, not true or even fake. does this, not now that we know this happened, does this vindicate what the indianapolis star did? i think it s a complicated answer to that question, howie, because i think conservatives and other people were right to be, let s say, skeptical of this story and to question whether or not it was real. i think asserting that it was false or fake was also premature. but one source who is an advocate with scant details and really no proof, that s not enough, in my view, to go on print or go on air, certainly to get all the way up to the president of the united states stating a story as if it were fact when it had not been established. now, it turns out that the is true. there are questions about that the story is true. there are questions with about ohio s law, the a.g. in ohio says it s not illegal.