After Shep Smith Fact Checks Uranium One “Scandal,” Fox & Friends Fuels Conspiracy

How Trump’s favorite show reacted to Hillary Clinton warning about a Republican “abuse of power.”

It’s as if one network was existing in two alternate realities. 

On Tuesday, Fox News anchor Shep Smith dismantled his network’s embrace of the Uranium One story, explaining in great detail how the popular conservative conspiracy theory was a non-story.

On Thursday, Fox & Friends host Ashley Earhardt bashed Hillary Clinton’s for claiming, in a new interview with Mother Jones, that the story had been discredited:

“She says in that statement, she says, ‘Has Uranium One been debunked—Uranium One has been debunked countless times by the press and by independent experts.’ Who’s the press? CNN? Wall Street JournalWall Street—I mean, The Washington PostThe New York Times?”

In case Earnhardt missed her colleague’s earlier meticulous takedown of the Uranium One narrative, here’s a clip:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RnsAZzsdI1U

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DONALD TRUMP & DEMOCRACY

Mother Jones was founded to do things differently in the aftermath of a political crisis: Watergate. We stand for justice and democracy. We reject false equivalence. We go after, and go deep on, stories others don’t. And we’re a nonprofit newsroom because we knew corporations and billionaires would never fund the journalism we do. Our reporting makes a difference in policies and people’s lives changed.

And we need your support like never before to vigorously fight back against the existential threats American democracy and journalism face. We’re running behind our online fundraising targets and urgently need all hands on deck right now. We can’t afford to come up short—we have no cushion; we leave it all on the field.

Please help with a donation today if you can—even just a few bucks helps. Not ready to donate but interested in our work? Sign up for our Daily newsletter to stay well-informed—and see what makes our people-powered, not profit-driven, journalism special.

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