This article is more than 9 months old

This article is more than 9 months old

Tucker Carlson is rooting for Russia in its conflict with Ukraine – or at least he said he was on his Fox News primetime show.

“Why do I care … what is going on in the conflict between Ukraine and Russia?” the host said. “And I’m serious. Why do I care? Why shouldn’t I root for Russia, which I am?”

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Carlson later said he was joking, despite having said he was serious, possibly because of the social media backlash he inevitably provoked.

“The endorsement of Russia’s aggression against Ukraine delivered tonight by Tucker Carlson is a pretty specialized form of Trump admiration,” wrote David Frum, a former Bush speechwriter now an ardent critic of Trump and his supporters.

“Why the F are you rooting for Russia?!?” asked the former tennis star Martina Navratilova. “And not Ukraine?!? Could you expand on that, Tucker? Please enlighten us idiots …”

Carlson is one of a number of Fox News hosts who both regularly provoke controversy and enjoy a direct line to the president. He has influenced foreign policy. In June, Carlson was reported to have averted airstrikes against Iran by speaking to Trump directly.

He made his comment about Ukraine in a discussion of the impeachment inquiry with Richard Goodstein, a former adviser to Hillary Clinton.

The inquiry focuses on Trump’s attempts to have Ukraine investigate his own political rivals and a baseless conspiracy theory which says Ukraine interfered in the 2016 election, not Russia.

As well as dangling a White House meeting in front of President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, by its own admission the Trump administration withheld nearly $400m of military aid intended to help the Kyiv government in its conflict with pro-Russian separatists in the east of the country.

The aid was released in September, as it became known that an intelligence community whistleblower had filed a complaint, triggering moves in Congress that led to the impeachment inquiry.

On Carlson’s show, Goodstein pointed to testimony before the House intelligence committee last week. David Holmes, a US official based in Ukraine, said Gordon Sondland, ambassador to the EU and a key player in the approach to Ukraine, said Trump “doesn’t give a shit” about corruption in the country, the stated reason for pressuring Zelenskiy.

“We do care about the substance of it,” Carlson said. “And the substance of it is that Trump, for all of his sins and I will concede some of them, has never taken close to a million dollars a year from a Ukrainian energy company to do nothing because his dad is the vice-president. So, Hunter Biden did.”

The son of Joe Biden, the former vice-president who is a frontrunner to face Trump at the polls next year, had a board position at a Ukrainian energy company. There is no suggestion he or his father did anything illegal.

“I actually like Hunter Biden,” Carlson continued, “but that’s totally corrupt and you know it. Why is it worse to ask about it than do it?”

Goldstein said: “Because people are dying on the frontlines.”

Laughing, Carlson said: “Why do I care, why do I care what is going on in the conflict between Ukraine and Russia? And I’m serious. Why do I care? Why shouldn’t I root for Russia, which I am.”

Because, Goldstein said, “preserving democracy is important”.

“I don’t care!” Carlson said.

By the end of his show it seemed he did, as he said: “Before we go, earlier … I noted, I was rooting for Russia in the contest between Russia and Ukraine. Of course I’m joking, I’m only rooting for America.”

The “I was only joking” defence has been used extensively by Trump or by Republicans defending his more outrageous claims: about asking Russia to hack Clinton’s emails, for example, and about asking China to investigate the Bidens.

Claiming to have been mocking the obsession with Russia of “many on the left”, Carlson concluded: “Ha!”