Ralph Peters is a retired Army officer, a former enlisted man and former strategic analyst for Fox News with deep experience in Russian studies.
Last week, he resigned his position from Fox, and today he goes into detail regarding why in a blistering op-ed for The Washington Post.
You could measure the decline of Fox News by the drop in the quality of guests waiting in the green room.
A year and a half ago, you might have heard George Will discussing policy with a senator while a former Cabinet member listened in. Today, you would meet a Republican commissar with a steakhouse waistline and an eager young woman wearing too little fabric and too much makeup, immersed in memorizing her talking points.
This wasn’t a case of the rats leaving a sinking ship. The best sailors were driven overboard by the rodents.
As early as the fall of 2016, and especially as doubts mounted about the new Trump administration’s national security vulnerabilities, I increasingly was blocked from speaking on the issues about which I could offer real expertise: Russian affairs and our intelligence community.
I did not hide my views at Fox and, as word spread that I would not unswervingly support President Trump and, worse, that I believed an investigation into Russian interference was essential to our national security, I was excluded from segments that touched on Vladimir Putin’s possible influence on an American president, his campaign or his administration.
I was the one person on the Fox payroll who, trained in Russian studies and the Russian language, had been face to face with Russian intelligence officers in the Kremlin and in far-flung provinces. I have traveled widely in and written extensively about the region.
Yet I could only rarely and briefly comment on the paramount security question of our time: whether Putin and his security services ensnared the man who would become our president. Trump’s behavior patterns and evident weaknesses (financial entanglements, lack of self-control and sense of sexual entitlement) would have made him an ideal blackmail target — and the Russian security apparatus plays a long game.
Listening to political hacks with no knowledge of things Russian tell the vast Fox audience that the special counsel’s investigation was a “witch hunt,” while I could not respond, became too much to bear.
There is indeed a witch hunt, and it’s led by Fox against Robert Mueller.
Head over to The Washington Post for more of what someone who's actually trained in Russian studies has to say about Fox News' handling of the investigation.
