Fox News’s Tucker Carlson said Monday that he received a cease and desist letter from Tony Podesta’s lawyer over his reporting on the Podesta Group.
Not only does the threatening letter demand Carlson stop discussing reports about the group but that they also retract and delete all previous reporting as well. This, Carlson said, was an effort to “use fear to control press coverage.”
“Podesta isn’t just complaining about us, he’s threatening us,” Carlson said on his show Monday.
The letter, he continued, “demands that the show ‘immediately cease and desist disseminating false and misleading reports about Mr. Podesta and the Podesta group.’ It demands we retract and delete all our prior reporting on the Podesta group and warns that if we don’t do this, ‘Mr. Podesta may pursue legal action, including for damages in order to fully protect his rights.”
The lawyer also said Carlson could not quote from the letter publicly, citing the copyright act, which Carlson clearly did not listen to.
But the Fox News host found the most “amusing” line of the letter to be the lawyer’s claim that “Paul Manafort did not work with the Podesta Group in its representation of the European center for a modern Ukraine.”
Tucker said it was obvious the lawyer had not read the Manafort indictment, which clearly stated otherwise.
“Maybe we’re being too literal about this,” Carlson said. “Podesta’s lawyer wasn’t trying to inform us of anything — but to threaten us, to shut down our reporting on his client. One lawyer we talked to earlier today said the Podesta people have used this tactic with others before, it’s common. It’s an effort to use fear to control press coverage. We’re not intimidated, we have ample evidence from Mueller’s indictment and from a number of confidential sources to paint a pretty clear picture of exactly what the Podesta Group was doing for years here in Washington. We’ll let the facts speak for themselves, and we’re confident the Mueller investigation will be revealing a lot more about his lobbying practices in the near future.”
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