Jen Psaki hits out at Fox News for Capitol riot hypocrisy revealed in Meadows texts

Prominent personalities who downplayed attack revealed to have pleaded with Trump’s chief of staff to stop assault on Congress

White House press secretary Jen Psaki said the revelations of pleading text messages to Donald Trump’s chief of staff from prominent Fox News personalities and Republican lawmakers during the assault on the US Capitol on 6 January are “disappointing” but “not surprising”.

“It’s disappointing and unfortunately not surprising that some of the very same individuals who were willing to warn, condemn and express horror over what happened … in private were totally silent in public, or worse, spreading lies and conspiracy theories,” she told reporters at the White House on 14 December.

Text messages reviewed by a House committee investigating the attack included Fox News hosts – who repeatedly downplayed the former president’s role in the riots in the weeks and months after the attack – pleading to Mr Meadows to urge then-president Trump to call off his supporters.

Among them were messages from Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham and Brian Kilmeade.

“The president needs to tell people in the Capitol to go home. This is hurting all of us. He is destroying his legacy,” Fox anchor Laura Ingraham said in a text, according to US Rep Liz Cheney, who read messages during a hearing on Monday to recommend contempt of Congress charges against Mr Meadows.

“Can he make a statement? Ask people to leave the Capitol?” Hannity wrote, according to the committee.

“Please get him on TV,” Kilmeade wrote, the committee said. “Destroying everything you have accomplished.”

The committee determined that Mr Meadows’s refusal to testify about the 6 January insurrection is obstructing its investigation and has recommended his prosecution for contempt of Congress.

The committee voted to advance referring Mr Meadows to the US Department of Justice on criminal contempt of Congress charges, and the full House of Representatives will debate and vote on the measure on 14 December.

Mr Meadows has accused congressional Democrats of trying to “weaponise” the information he previously provided the committee as he faces explosive accusations of treason.

During live coverage of the attack, Ingraham called the riots “disgraceful” and said that the president needed to tell “everyone to leave the building,” but that same night she also suggested that the crowd was not made up of Trump supporters.

She also deflected from the attack by calling the arrival of migrants at the US-Mexico border an “insurrection” against America, and has mocked testimony from law enforcement officers to members of Congress, suggesting that officers who were attacked on 6 January exaggerated the events of that day.

Republicans who supported the former president’s persistent lies of election fraud that fuelled the attack have also sought to deflect blame and repeatedly downplay the riots and Mr Trump’s involvement, while drawing baseless comparisons to protests against police violence and immigration.

“He’s got to condemn this s*** ASAP,” Donald Trump Jr wrote to Mr Meadows, according to texts obtained by the committee. “The Capitol Police tweet is not enough.”

He also told Mr Meadows that “we need an Oval address. He has to lead now. It has gone too far and gotten out of hand.”