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On Tuesday, Fox News primetime host Tucker Carlson seemed to beg President Joe Biden to stop the Manhattan District Attorney’s inquiry into former President Donald Trump.
Trump claimed over the weekend that he would be arrested this week because of that investigation, which is reportedly examining whether he illegally falsified business records to make hush money payments to an adult film actress he allegedly had an affair with. The former president called for his followers to protest on Tuesday against him being arrested, which few actually did.
On Tuesday night, Carlson made a direct call to Biden to stop the Manhattan-based inquiry, an action that the president of the United States doesn’t actually have the power to do.
Carlson falsely claimed that the grand jury examining Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s evidence against Trump would “certainly be overwhelmingly liberal,” a claim that is entirely baseless because no one outside the local judiciary knows who is sitting on the panel. He also suggested that a charge against Trump would be detrimental to the country, despite knowing nothing about the exact details of the evidence or the potential charges.
“Unless something unexpected happens, Democrats will have taken the unprecedented step of using a corrupt justice system to take out the front runner in the Republican presidential field in a presidential race,” Carlson said, referring to Trump’s announced run for president in 2024. “If that happens, America will never be the same.”
Carlson then suggested that Biden and Attorney General Merrick Garland needed to take action to prevent a charge against Trump, stating:
You’ve got to hope that for the sake of the country, the Biden White House, which will be running against Trump, will put the country above partisanship and stop this. And that Merrick Garland at the DOJ will issue a very public statement saying that this is wrong — which it is — and therefore preserve for our grandchildren our justice system.
Notably, the president of the United States cannot micromanage local investigations at the state level, meaning that Biden has no official say over whether or not Bragg issues an indictment.
Biden can issue a forceful statement against the inquiry or eventual charges against Trump, if he wanted to. Doing so, however, would improperly influence and politicize the outcome of a criminal investigation, something that Carlson and Republicans claim they are against.
Notably, Trump and Fox News personalities promoted chants of “lock her up” regarding then-Democratic candidate for president Hillary Clinton, prominently featuring such chants in campaign rallies for Trump during his 2016 presidential run. In recent days, as Trump and his allies level accusations that inquiries into his actions are “politically motivated,” some hosts have dubiously claimed that chants directed at Clinton were just “jokes.”
In truth, Trump was reportedly very interested in using his political powers to go after his opponents, including Clinton. According to reporting from The New York Times in 2018, for instance, Trump wanted the DOJ to arrest Clinton over allegations that she had used a private email server to hide classified material. (Clinton has been exonerated of any purposeful wrongdoing). His White House legal counsel told him that he couldn’t do so, the reporting indicated.
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