.@jasoninthehouse told @BretBaier about his plan to investigate Tuesday's report that @POTUS may have asked Comey t… https://t.co/t6ksJn99zA

The mushrooming chaos erupting from the White House is testing the boundaries of one of the Trump administration’s safest spaces: Fox News.



On Tuesday evening, the New York Times published a bombshell story reporting that former FBI director James Comey wrote a memo after a meeting with President Trump that detailed how the president asked him to drop the investigation into former national security adviser Michael Flynn.

The revelation of the memo — shared with Comey’s close associates and confirmed by other outlets, but not obtained by them — quickly cascaded across a cable news landscape already gearing up to cover another major story, the Washington Post’s Monday report that the president discussed classified information with Russian officials in an Oval Office meeting.

Exhausted Republicans ducked for cover. Some Washington Democrats started to mention tentatively the word impeachment. MSNBC promised in a chyron that it would be “Trump v. Comey all night.”

But on Fox News, at least initially, the news landed with a thud.

“Comey is a smart man. There’s no way he doesn’t realize, in the absence of tapes, it’s his word against Donald Trump’s word, and it’s going nowhere,” Eric Bolling said on Fox’s 5 p.m. hour show, the Fox News Specialists. “So what is the point of this?”

This kicked off the network’s split approach for the night — and laid bare the dueling impulses at the network.

On the one hand, Fox pundits on the network’s primetime block, from Jesse Watters to Tucker Carlson to Sean Hannity, pooh-poohed the report. On the other hand, Fox’s journalists delivered facts between the punditry — facts that confirmed some of the New York Times’ story.

During the 6 p.m. hour, for instance, Fox’s chief political anchor Bret Baier twice relayed the fact that Republican lawmakers were not willing to go on camera to defend Trump.

At 8 p.m., Carlson squared off against a New York City Council Member, and the two talked completely past each other — Carlson about Penn Station bathrooms and the councilman about Trump and Russia. Later segments on Carlson’s show reflected on the liberal media’s hysteria and the fact that ABC cancelled a Tim Allen sitcom enjoyed by conservatives.