Ralph Peters abruptly quit his job as a Fox News strategic analyst on Tuesday. Instead of leaving quietly, the retired Army lieutenant colonel wrote a scathing letter blasting the Trump administration and his former employer for “assaulting our constitutional order and the rule of law, while fostering corrosive and unjustified paranoia among viewers.”
“Fox has degenerated from providing a legitimate and much-needed outlet for conservative voices to a mere propaganda machine for a destructive and ethically ruinous administration,” wrote Peters in a letter to his former colleagues at the network, obtained and published by BuzzFeed.
“Over my decade with Fox, I long was proud of the association. Now I am ashamed,” Peters wrote before launching into an attack on the network’s prime-time hosts.
“When prime-time hosts–who have never served our country in any capacity–dismiss facts and empirical reality to launch profoundly dishonest assaults on the FBI, the Justice Department, the courts, the intelligence community (in which I served) and, not least, a model public servant and genuine war hero such as Robert Mueller–all the while scaremongering with lurid warnings of ‘deep-state’ machinations– I cannot be part of the same organization, even at a remove. To me, Fox News is now wittingly harming our system of government for profit,” wrote the former Fox News contributor.
Peters also criticized network hosts for supposedly advancing Russian President Vladimir Putin’s “agenda by making light of Russian penetration of our elections and the Trump campaign.”
Fox News didn’t take Peters’ criticism lying down. The network fired back in a statement, saying Peters is “entitled to his opinion despite the fact that he’s choosing to use it as a weapon in order to gain attention.”
“We are extremely proud of our top-rated primetime hosts and all of our opinion programming,” said the statement.