George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley called out MSNBC host Nicolle Wallace for labeling Republicans as “conspiracy theorists” Tuesday, citing multiple instances where Wallace made false claims.
Wallace attacked Republicans as “conspiracy theorists” during Monday’s episode of “Deadline: White House,” in an episode where she claimed that former President Donald Trump would remove her from the air if he were to win the 2024 election. Turley reacted to Wallace’s comments in a Tuesday blog post.
“It is not accurate to say everyone in the Republican Party is a conspiracy theorist but as with racists, all of the conspiracy theorists are Republicans,” Wallace said.
“It was a crushingly ironic moment,” Turley wrote. “Wallace has been repeatedly criticized for spreading false news.”
Turley cited Wallace claiming that the Hunter Biden laptop was a “Russian disinformation operation” in his post, a claim echoed in an October 2020 letter signed by dozens of former intelligence officials that claimed a bombshell New York Post report about emails from a laptop supposedly abandoned by Hunter Biden “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”
The letter came days after the Oct. 14, 2020 New York Post report on the contents of a laptop abandoned by Hunter Biden at a computer repair shop. The Daily Caller News Foundation confirmed the authenticity of some of the contents that month.
Wallace and other MSNBC hosts also and guests routinely hyped the claims that Trump’s 2016 campaign colluded with the Russian government to defeat former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. MSNBC repeatedly had Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff of California, who often made claims about alleged collusion between the 2016 Trump campaign and Russia, on the air.
The Steele Dossier, which was used to further allegations of collusion, was later discredited. Turley hit at Wallace, who dismissed the findings of special counsel John Durham which detailed FBI failures to vet the document before using it to obtain warrants under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to monitor communications by Carter Page and other associates of former President Trump during Trump’s successful 2016 campaign for the White House.
“Wallace and MSNBC pushed the false story of border agents whipping migrants in Texas,” Turley wrote about the September 2021 incident. The agents involved in the incident were cleared of criminal charges in April 2022.
Emails obtained by the Heritage Foundation and shared with the DCNF in October 2022 revealed that Secretary of Homeland Security Mayorkas knew that the news photographer on the scene of the 2021 incident disputed claims that mounted Border Patrol agents whipped Haitian migrants.
“Many on the left now routinely call opposing views as spreaders of disinformation or conspiracy theories,” Turley wrote. “The Biden Administration has funded various groups to blacklist or bar those with opposing views as disinformation, malinformation, or misinformation.”
MSNBC and Wallace did not immediately respond to requests for comment from the DCNF.
