'I’ve heard that said a lot': Fox host defends Trump over Harris-Putin lie

22 August 2024

Donald Trump falsely told a crowd of North Carolina supporters on Wednesday that President Joe Biden had sent Vice President Kamala Harris to meet with Vladimir Putin to prevent him from invading Ukraine in 2022, days before the Russian President ordered his forces to attack the sovereign nation.

“Remember when Biden sent Kamala to Europe to stop the war in Ukraine?” Trump said at a rally in Asheboro, continuing to pronounce the Vice President’s name wrong, “She met with Putin, and then three days later, he attacked. How did she do, do you think she did a good job? She met with Putin to tell him, ‘don’t do it.’ And three days later he attacked. That’s when the attack started.”

That was a lie.

Trump repeated and embellished the same lie Thursday morning, telling Fox News’ “Fox & Friends” hosts in a call-in audio-only interview, “Biden sent, I called her ‘Comrade Kamala.’ Sent Comrade Kamala to see Putin in Russia three days before the attack. She went. She said she gave her case. He attacked three days later. He attacked. Three days later, he laughed at her. He thought she was a joke.”

Fox News’ Brian Kilmeade, a staunch Trump supporter, told viewers, “Yeah. And just as a quick clarification, we don’t have confirmation that the Vice President went to Russia to meet with Vladimir Putin. I know she went over to Europe right before the incursion, when Russia invaded Ukraine, and it’s a war that’s still going on right now.”

But Fox News’ Ainsley Airhardt told Kilmeade, “I’ve heard that said a lot. You don’t have confirmation that that’s true?”

“I don’t know if the vice president ever met Vladimir Putin,” Kilmeade remarked on a story that had already been debunked.

Earlier in their interview, Airhardt told Trump that Democrats at this week’s Democratic National Convention are “spreading so many different lies.”

CNN Wednesday evening reported: “Trump’s claim is false. Harris has never met with Putin. In reality, she met with US allies, including Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, at the Munich Security Conference in the days before Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Putin was not at the conference.”

The network’s fact-checker, Daniel Dale, added a quote from a Kremlin spokesperson: “Frankly speaking, I cannot recall a single contact between President Putin and Mrs. Harris.”

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