'Ruins his chances': Fox News guest fact-checks host emphasizing Trump allies 'knew' he 'was wrong'

After former President Donald Trump was indicted by a Florida grand jury Thursday, the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) released photos of boxes holding classified documents at the 2024 hopeful's Mar-a-Lago estate — which he insisted was "staged."

During a conversation with Fox News host Martha MacCallum Friday, Fox News contributor Jessica Tarlov pushed back on the conservative host's attempt to undermine the magnitude of the 37-criminal count, 49-page indictment against the former president.

The clip, shared via Twitter by The Recount, starts with Tarlov saying, "Well, listening to what Mark Levin was saying, and I know he was just on the phone, I'd hoped that he would be on-air, and we could see him and he could see what was going on on the screen as he was talking as you were panning over the photos that came out on the indictment, of how these documents were kept."

READ MORE: DOJ unseals 'egregious' and 'devastating' 37-count Trump criminal indictment (full text)

MacCallum interrupts, saying, "He's seen the indictment, he went through the whole thing."

Tarlov continues, "I understand, but when you are saying, 'How is this happening?' 'How is this possible?' — In all of our history, that is unprecedented. The way that those documents were stored, what's on that tape, him talking about the document, he runs his mouth and he ruins his chances at anyone who is not a die-hard supporter being able to take his side in this. Everything that they've been trotting out for the last year has been disproven. When you talk about that they were all stored properly, that they were all declassified, now he's on tape saying—"

The host interrupted Tarlov again, asking, "You feel the same way about the ones that were stored behind the corvette in the garage, right?"

Tarlov replied, "I don't— well, the good thing about this is that Joe Biden has his own special counsel, and we'll find out what was going on there."

READ MORE: Jack Smith: Trump broke laws critical to the 'safety and security of the United States'

MacCallum said, "Absolutely, and you're as appalled by that as you are seeing this, right?"

The contributor emphasized, "I want to see what it is, I want to know how those documents were treated, I wanna know if he was talking about them, if he knew that he had them and was waving them around. If he was talking to random people about it.. I mean, there was someone in the mark Meadows conversation who said, 'now, we're in trouble.' This is something that people in his orbit knew were wrong."

MacCallum concluded, "I hear everything you're saying. I think in this country, since we have such an intense situation going on with all of this, and it's been going on the past eight years, it's very easy to jump ahead, right? And I'm just encouraging people, this is, by all accounts, Jonathan Turly and everybody else, so there's a lot in here, right? There's a lot in here. And the grand jury did find that they wanna move forward with the trial, but we haven't heard the other side. That's all I'm saying."

READ MORE: Here are some of the Trump indictment’s most shocking revelations

During a news conference Friday afternoon, DOJ special counsel Jack Smith spoke on the indictment, saying, "We have one set of laws in this country, and they apply to everyone. Applying those laws, collecting facts, that's what determines the outcome of an investigation. Nothing more and nothing less."

Watch the video below or at this link.

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