UPDATE: This piece has been updated to reflect a comment from Trump Media and Technology Group.
CNN host Brian Stelter and reporter Oliver Darcy attacked conservative media Sunday, claiming criticism of the Aug. 8 raid on Mar-a-Lago was “aiming to malign” the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).
“It’s not criticism from the right,” Darcy said. “They’re not criticizing the FBI, they’re aiming to malign the FBI. They’re assaulting the character of the FBI. And I don’t think that the fervor on the right really has shined through in news coverage. It just feels like we are almost ignoring or just hoping that you can ignore some of the rhetoric from these MAGA media stars.” (RELATED: ‘Like Brian Stelter In Yoga Pants’: Greg Gutfeld Tears Into Media’s Trump Raid Talking Points)
Many conservatives and Republicans have been outspoken critics of the raid, when FBI agents executed a search warrant as part of an investigation into allegations surrounding classified material reportedly taken by former President Donald Trump and seized 11 classified documents.
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Darcy called conservative rhetoric “very extreme.”
“It’s incendiary rhetoric and it has consequences and we’re seeing, you know, earlier this week, there was that attack on the FBI field office,” Darcy said.
Stelter claimed that the alleged attacker of a FBI office in Cincinnati was “an obsessed TRUTH Social user, addicted to Trump’s social network.”
“The user in question had posted on Truth Social for no more than a few days, which is even less time than CNN+ lasted on the Internet,” a spokesman for Trump Media and Technology Group told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
Stelter noted that similar rhetoric accompanied the passage of legislation to increase funding for the Internal Revenue Service.
“One of the components of the bill, there’s a lot more funding for the IRS to hire tens of thousands of more IRS agents in order to try to make sure people are paying how much they’re supposed to pay,” Stelter said. “What was that called on the right? It was called a terrifying overreach by the government.”
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“The reason I’m bringing it up is, let’s just call it what it is, MAGA media’s hatred of government is reaching a new high,” Stelter continued. “When you have a combination of these FBI stories and the IRS getting a lot more funding, this is a new peak in terms of that anti- government sentiment. So it’s no wonder that there’s concerns inside government about security and about threats.”
The owner of Truth Social, and the Republican National Committee did not immediately respond to requests for comment from the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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