Fox News’ Jessica Tarlov called out Jeanine Pirro, co-host of “The Five,” on Thursday after Republicans tried to blame the deadly New Orleans vehicle ramming attack on undocumented immigrants.
Tarlov — after Pirro called Joe Biden an “embarrassment” over his response to the New Year’s Day attack — urged her colleague to “listen to all” of the president’s remarks including his call to “make sure we have the right facts” on the incident.
“And the right facts were that the guy in New Orleans was an American. He wasn’t an illegal crossing —,” said Tarlov of Shamsud-Din Jabbar, the attack suspect that authorities have identified as a U.S. citizen from Texas.
“Nobody’s saying he wasn’t,” Pirro said.
“That’s not true,” Tarlov replied.
The on-air clash came after President-elect Donald Trump, in a post to his Truth Social platform on Wednesday morning, falsely suggested that immigration policies were to blame in a post that addressed the attack.
Fox News, prior to Trump’s post, made a since-retracted report that the vehicle used by the suspect crossed the U.S.-Mexico border two days before the attack.
“When you say, ‘I’m embarrassed watching Joe Biden,’ I’m not embarrassed seeing someone stand up there and saying, ‘Let’s wait for some facts here,’ because Donald Trump went out there and he said —,” Tarlov said.
“No, he assured Americans all was well,” Pirro interjected.
“You guys know exactly what he said, no,” Tarlov continued.
On Thursday, Republicans used the attack to go after the Biden administration’s immigration policies, including Trump, who had criticized “OPEN BORDERS” in a Truth Social post and declared that there’s been a “violent erosion of Safety, National Security, and Democracy” in America.
“With the Biden ‘Open Border’s Policy’ I said, many times during Rallies, and elsewhere, that Radical Islamic Terrorism, and other forms of violent crime, will become so bad in America that it will become hard to even imagine or believe,” he wrote in a separate post.
“That time has come, only worse than ever imagined.”
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), in a Fox Business appearance on Thursday, knocked the Biden administration for trying “to convince us that the greatest threat to the homeland was racially motivated extremism.”
“When we all looked at the wide-open border and thought logically that that might lead to terrorist attacks in the future,” he continued.
Tarlov, on Thursday’s episode of “The Five,” said that Republicans have been on TV “talking about how this was an open border problem” and trying to demonize undocumented immigrants.
“Yeah, it is a demonization, and we haven’t even —,” Pirro chimed in.
“But these aren’t undocumented people, these are Americans,” Tarlov replied.
“Seventy-five percent of the arrests in New York City are illegals. Let’s stop playing games,” Pirro said.
“Move the goalposts, move them as far as you want. Sugar Bowl-wide. Whatever,” Tarlov said.
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H/T: Mediaite