A veteran Fox News host has said that the alleged collusion the Trump campaign is being investigated for is “not a crime.”
A veteran Fox News host has said that the alleged collusion the Trump campaign is being investigated for is “not a crime.”
Brit Hume made the statement on 'Fox News Sunday' during a panel discussion of the special counsel probe involving Russia; after one member brought up a grand jury and the possibility of criminal charges, he said, “But what crime? Can anybody identify the crime?”
He added, in part, “Collusion, while it’s obviously alarming and highly inappropriate for the Trump campaign--of which there is no evidence by the way...It's not a crime.”
Hume had also said earlier in the conversation that the “...investigation has never been officially described as anything other than a counterintelligence investigation, which is to say that its purpose was to find out the extent of the Russians’ attempts to interfere in the election and to influence the election. And it was not therefore a criminal investigation, and has never been described as a criminal investigation.”
Other Fox News hosts have made similar arguments including Gregg Jarrett who said last month, “Collusion is not a crime, only an antitrust law...You can collude all you want with a foreign government in an election. There is no such statute.”
Sean Hannity also reportedly questioned on his radio show if it would be illegal for a Trump campaign associate to encourage a Russian operative to release hacked Democratic emails; according to him, the action would be a way to “show the truth.”
Despite the arguments, PolitiFact determined that the claim absolving the president and his associates of criminal liability connected to the allegations was false.
The watchdog site says it checked with three election law experts “and they all said that while the word ‘collusion’ might not appear in key statutes...working with the Russians could violate criminal laws.”
Stanford University Law School's Nathaniel Persily pointed out, for example, that “a foreign national spending money to influence a federal election can be a crime. And if a U.S. citizen coordinates, conspires or assists in that spending, then it could be a crime.”
