Attorney General William Barr told Rupert Murdoch to ‘mouth’ Andrew Napolitano, a leading Fox News personality who became a critic of Donald Trump, according to a new book on the right-wing TV network.
Barr’s meeting with Murdoch, at the media mogul’s home in New York in October 2019, was widely reported at the time, with speculation surrounding the subject. According to Hoax: Donald Trump, Fox News and the Dangerous Distortion of Truth, by CNN media reporter Brian Stelter, topics covered included media consolidation and criminal justice reform.
“But it was also about Judge Andrew Napolitano.”
Stelter’s in-depth look at Fox News, his fortune under Trump and his links to his White House will be published Tuesday. The Guardian received a copy.
In early 2019, it was reported that Napolitano, a New Jersey judge who joined Fox News in 1998, told friends he was on Trump’s shortlist for the Supreme Court. But he broke ranks later in the year, highlighting Trump’s approach to Ukraine, and seeking political filth about rivals, “both criminal and imperative behavior.”
“The criminal conduct that Trump has permitted,” Napolitano wrote in an October 3 column, “is far more serious than anything alleged or discovered by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, and much of what Mueller has revealed was inaccessible.”
Citing an unnamed source, Stelter writes that Trump was “so upset by the judge’s TV broadcasts that he begged Barr to send Rupert a message in person… about ‘muzzling the Judge’. [Trump] wanted the nation’s top function to present exactly how much Napolitano’s legal analysis had been. ‘
Barr is widely accused of riding on the rule of law, in the service of Trump and his own authoritarian view of the presidency.
Although Barr’s words to Murdoch “carried a lot of weight”, Stelter writes, “no one was explicitly told to take Napolitano off the air”. Instead, Stelter reports, Napolitano found digital resources elsewhere, saw a lock on a show disappear during the day, and was not included in coverage of the impeachment process.
According to Stelter, Napolitano thought he was being held off the air by “25-year-old producers” who did not think viewers could handle his analysis. Stelter, however, says an unnamed “twenty-year-old staffer” confirmed that one host, Maria Bartiromo, would only reserve Napolitano to discuss non-Trump topics because he would overreact to Bartiromo if he criticized the president.
The Fox News audience, of course, remains loyal to Trump as his re-election campaign continues. Some Fox employees, Stelter writes, “justify the judge’s benching by claiming that viewers hate him: ‘Why should we have one book that kills our ratings?'”
Napolitano has continued to appear on Fox News and publish opinion columns. He has remained critical of Trump, for example, slinging the actions of federal officers sent to confront Protestants in Portland, Oregon; opposite attempts to provide coronavirus relief without congressional involvement; and said Republicans in the House of Representatives should have named new witnesses in the presidency.
He has also spoken harshly to Barr, for example, calling his behavior in the case of Trump ally Roger Stone “Stalinist”; extinguishing his handling of the Mueller report in favor of Trump; and beat him for ‘insulting’ Congress.
However, Napolitano reversed Barr’s attempt to oust prosecutors against Michael Flynn, Trump’s first national security adviser who pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about contacts with Russian officials.
