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Suspended Fox News Host Eric Bolling Files Lawsuit Against Journalist Behind Alleged Sexting Report

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‘Eric Bolling Is Suing Me for Defamation – $50 Million in Damages. I Stand by My Reporting + Will Protect My Sources’ Reporter Says

Fox News host Eric Bolling reportedly has initiated a $50 million lawsuit against the freelance reporter whose article apparently led to his suspension from the conservative cable news giant this weekend, according to a report in Politico. Yashar Ali, who has delivered reporting for New York Magazine, Mother Jones, and HuffPost, posted to Twitter that he has been served a summons.

He also noted that Bolling is not suing HuffPost, which published Ali’s article.

Ali says he will not stop reporting:

A CNN reporter posted a screenshot of the lawsuit to Twitter:

Ali confirmed its validity.

Politico’s Hadas Gold, who first reported news of the lawsuit after Ali posted his tweets, explains that Ali “reported on Friday that several years ago Bolling sent lewd text messages that included photographs of male genitalia to two female colleagues at Fox. The next day Bolling was suspended and Fox launched an investigation by the same law firm that handled probes into the conduct of former host Bill O’Reilly and former Fox chairman Roger Ailes.”

After the initial report, Bolling said, via his lawyer, that he “recalls no such inappropriate communications, does not believe he sent any such communications, and will vigorously pursue his legal remedies for any false and defamatory accusations that are made.”

On Wednesday, Bolling filed a “summons with notice” in New York State Supreme Court against Ali, seeking $50 million in damages for defamation. Ali must respond within 20 days, demanding that Bolling file a complaint, after which Bolling will have 20 days to file his response before the suit goes forward.

Gold notes that “Bolling is represented by Michael Bowe from the same law firm as Marc Kasowitz, who was President Donald Trump’s personal attorney until last month.”

Variety adds that “Ali’s report cited two unnamed women who said they received unsolicited photos of male genitalia from Bolling. Ali also spoke with a dozen people who had either seen the messages or spoken to the women about them.”

Ali was first to report that MSNBC was in talks to hire Hugh Hewitt and give him his own show, which it did.

Here’s a recent Fox News segment Bolling hosted:

UPDATE:
Ali, who has a strong Twitter following, just added this tweet, which says a lot about him.

UPDATE II:
Editor in Chief of HuffPost, which published the original article on Bolling:

 

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News

Peter Doocy Admits No ‘Concrete Evidence Joe Biden Personally Profited’ From Hunter’s Business

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In a report focused on House Republicans’ plan to vote on a resolution to open an official impeachment inquiry of President Joe Biden, Fox News White House correspondent Peter Doocy told viewers there is no evidence of impeachable offenses.

“The House Oversight Committee has been at this for years, and they have so far not been able to provide any concrete evidence that Joe Biden personally profited from his son Hunter’s overseas business but they are going to try again with this impeachment inquiry set to start next week,” Doocy, who often criticizes President Biden in White House press briefings, said Friday on Fox News Business.

Other news outlets this week have also stressed Republicans have come up empty-handed.

The right-leaning news outlet The Hill, reporting on the resolution Thursday, noted Republicans’ current investigation “has struggled to connect President Biden to the activities of his son, and they’ve failed to prove their most salacious allegation — and the one that would be most key for impeachment: that the president accepted a bribe.”

READ MORE: Jobs Report Forces Fox News to Admit Biden Economy ‘A Lot Stronger Than Anybody Understands’

One of the main pillars of Republicans’ allegations against President Biden, the “narrative that President Biden pushed Ukraine to fire its prosecutor to help his son, who served on the board of Ukrainian energy company Burimsa, has largely been refuted,” The Hill also reported.

“Republicans have engaged in wide-ranging inquiry into Mr. Biden for months,” The New York Times reported Tuesday, “hunting for evidence to back up their allegations that he corruptly profited from his family members’ overseas business dealings and accepted bribes. To date, they have failed to deliver compelling evidence to back up their boldest claims.”

Watch Doocy below or at this link.

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Jobs Report Forces Fox News to Admit Biden Economy ‘A Lot Stronger Than Anybody Understands’

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The monthly jobs report released Friday morning is being heralded as “robust,” “upbeat,” and “stronger than expected,” as unemployment again dropped to a near-50-year low (3.7%) while the economy added another 199,000 jobs.

“It’s the little engine that could, and this little locomotive keeps a chugging along…” declared professor of economics and public policy scholar Justin Wolfers.

“So the last three months have seen jobs growth at a very healthy average rate of +204k per month,” he added. “For context: Average monthly job growth from Jan 2000 to Dec 2019 was +87k.”

“If I had asked you a year ago to sketch what you thought a soft landing might look like,” he said, praising America’s post-COVID pandemic economy, “it’s likely you would have pretty much drawn the current economic data.”

On Thursday, Wolfers had discussed the incongruence between what economic data consistently shows about the strength of the U.S. economy, and what Americans are telling pollsters.

READ MORE: ‘Straight Up Flout the Law’: Trump Declares Judge Chutkan No Longer Has Power Over His Case

“There’s no question people are telling pollsters they’re miserable about the economy. But riddle me this,” he asked, “Why can’t we find evidence of this pessimism in anything other that public opinion polls? Every non-poll based indicator of confidence suggests folks are optimistic.”

Heather Long, The Washington Post economic columnist, offered this view in response to Friday’s jobs report.

“Step back for a minute and look at this US job market,” she wrote.
“4.7 million more jobs than pre-pandemic
Below 4% unemployment for two years
Wages growing faster than inflation
Women (ages 25 to 54) at an all-time high for labor force participation”

Even Fox News was forced to deliver positive comments while reporting on Friday’s monthly numbers.

READ MORE: Jim Comer Decimated by NBC Reporter in ‘Under Two Minutes’

“Overall you’ve got to look at this report as a big positive,” admitted pro-Trump Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo. “We’ve got more jobs created than expected.”

Speaking to the former chief economist of The White House National Economic Council under President Trump, Bartiromo said, “Joe LaVorgna, you’ve been saying this, the economy is a lot stronger than anybody understands.”

Watch below or at this link.

 

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Right Wing Evangelicals Are ‘Marinating’ in ‘Information Aimed at Making Them Fearful, Hostile’: Journalist

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Evangelical support for former President Donald Trump, despite his own lack of devout faith, is no accident, author Tim Alberta told former CNN anchor Brian Stelter in an interview for Vanity Fair.

Rather, he argued, it is part of a deliberate campaign to radicalize and terrify them into loyalty — and part of what’s driving that is a “disproportionality crisis” of the information they are receiving.

““If you go to church on Sunday morning, you are going to be in the word with your pastor for, you know, 30 minutes, maybe 40, 45 minutes, and you sing some songs, and you say the prayers, and then you are out in the world for the rest of the week,” said Alberta. “And for most of these folks, as they’re out in the world, they are marinating in talk radio, in cable news, in social media—all of this information that is aimed at making them angry, fearful, hostile.”

Whereas they may hear Jesus’ message of tolerance, love, and forgiveness “on Sunday morning for 45 minutes, but then for 4, 5, 6, 10 hours during the week, you’re hearing the exact opposite. And it’s that ratio being so far out of whack that I think is really at the heart of the crisis here.”

And that’s assuming they’re at a church that will even give them messages of love and forgiveness in the first place — many pro-Trump pastors, like Greg Locke of Tennessee, have messages that are far angrier.

“[Trump] may not share their views, he may not sit in the pews with them, he may not read the good book like they do, but in some way, that’s his superpower,” Alberta explained. “He is free to fight in ways that are, you know, unrestrained, unmoored from biblical virtue. And that relationship with Trump has obviously evolved over the last eight years. What started as this very uneasy alliance for a lot of evangelicals with Trump has now morphed into this situation where, look, desperate times call for desperate measures. The barbarians are at the gates and we need a barbarian to keep them at bay.” This means that Trump’s increasingly dictatorial rhetoric is a natural outlet for the rage and frustration these evangelical voters are being fed.

None of this is to say that Trump has completely unified the evangelical world. Cracks have appeared in recent months, with prominent evangelical leaders like Bob Vander Plaats of Iowa endorsing Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis out of concern about Trump’s electoral viability.

 

Editor’s note: Tim Alberta is an award-winning g journalist, a staff writer for The Atlantic, and author of “The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism,” and “American Carnage: On the Front Lines of the Republican Civil War and the Rise of President Trump.”

 

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