House managers lay out their case against former President Trump
The 'Special Report' All-Star panel weigh in on day two of Senate impeachment trial
MSNBC star Rachel Maddow falsely accused Fox News of not airing the second impeachment trial of former President Donald Trump on Wednesday.
Maddow reacted to a Politico report that Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., was "incredibly shaken" by footage from the Jan. 6 Capitol riot presented by Democratic House impeachment managers. The report described Lankford as "teary-eyed" and having to be comforted by Sen. Steve Daines, R-Mont.
"Occurs to me now that those of us who've covered this story, and the public who've followed coverage of it, have seen some (but certainly not all) this footage before," Maddow began. "GOP Senators who mostly or exclusively consume conservative media really might be seeing it for the first time."
She then turned her sights on Fox News.
"Thinking of it particularly because Fox News Channel has not been taking the trial today," Maddow told her 10.6 million Twitter followers. "There will be a disconnect between GOP Senators seeing all this stuff, and their base voters whose news today was, like, culture war stuff about the NBA or the War on Christmas or whatever."
Fox News aired the majority of the impeachment hearing on Wednesday in addition to the opening statements from the impeachment managers and Trump's legal team on Tuesday.
Fox News has also been streaming coverage of the impeachment trial on FoxNews.com.
Maddow's tweet was called out on social media, including by NewsBusters managing editor Curtis Houck.
"It's 100% false to say that Fox News Channel hasn't been carrying the trial *at all,*" Houck wrote.
Maddow later walked back her tweet to clarify that Fox News did air the impeachment trial on Wednesday, but left up her initial tweet with the false claim.
MSNBC did not immediately respond to Fox News' request for comment.
While Maddow has touted the legitimacy of President Biden's victory in the 2020 presidential election, she sang a different tune after Donald Trump was sworn in as president, suggesting his presidency was illegitimate because of Russian interference in the 2016 election.
"Over the closing months of our presidential election and right up through the lame duck period before the new president was sworn in, we -- the American people, we had dropped on us a series of news bombs about Russia influencing our election, right? There was the unconfirmed dossier of dirt on Donald Trump that the Russian government had allegedly collected and was allegedly using against him to get him to do their bidding," Maddow said during the opening segment of "The Rachel Maddow Show" on Jan. 26, 2017, less than a week after Trump’s inauguration.
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"That unconfirmed, super-inflammatory dossier of information was reportedly collected by a well-respected former MI6 British intelligence operative. It was published online last month, whereupon that former British intelligence operative promptly disappeared," Maddow continued. "He took himself off the grid. His business partner said he did it for his own safety."
Maddow became MSNBC's star host by pushing the Russian collusion theory between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin.
Fox News' Brian Flood contributed to this report.