
Fox News host Shepard Smith and judicial analyst Andrew Napolitano just dropped a truth-bomb on their colleagues: "The president is in the line of fire."

As the unofficial propaganda arm of the Trump White House, Fox News has played a key role in the escalating smear campaign against special counsel Robert Mueller and his team of investigators.

Nearly every week, Fox pundits like Sean Hannity, Jeanine Pirro, Greg Jarrett, and Lou Dobbs invent a new scandal in a coordinated effort to try to discredit the Russia investigation and anyone associated with it.

For the most part, they get very little pushback from others in the pro-Trump echo chamber — but that changed on Tuesday, when Fox News judicial analyst Andrew Napolitano dropped a truth bomb on his colleagues who continue to claim "there's no 'there' there."


"Jared Kushner, Donald Trump Jr. — and the president is in the line of fire," Napolitano told Fox host Shepard Smith.

Napolitano's comments followed an exchange with Smith about the latest attempt to undermine Mueller, which came straight from Trump's lawyers and immediately hit the airwaves on Fox. They claim that Mueller violated the law when obtaining documents related to the presidential transition period — an attack that has already been widely debunked but nevertheless continues to circulate.

"It’s been widely said Trump’s lawyers believe this was illegal, this is a horrible thing happening," Smith said about Mueller's team obtaining the transition period documents. "Which is ridiculous."

"Perfectly legal and done every day of the week," Napolitano said of the procedures Mueller and his team used to obtain the documents.

"As a matter of course, to not get them would be derelict," Smith noted.

"Correct," Napolitano replied.

"Based on the evidence," Smith continued, "who is in the line of fire now?”

"Jared Kushner, Donald Trump, Jr. — and the president is in the line of fire," Napolitano said.

He then hit back at his Fox News colleagues, saying, "I’m critical of our colleagues that say there’s no ‘there’ there. You know what? This is a jigsaw puzzle with 100,000 pieces and we see a piece here and a piece there, and people say it doesn’t make any sense. It takes time to amass all of these pieces of evidence so that we see the jigsaw puzzle completed. That’s what Mueller and company are trying to do."

Napolitano also knocked down the idea that Michael Flynn's guilty plea was an insignificant development.

"Look, General Flynn was exposed to 60 years in jail, if he was convicted of every charge out there and sentenced to the max. He’s exposed to six months," Napolitano said. "How did he go from 60 years to six months? He must have given them something."

Napolitano's comments stand in stark contrast to other Fox News hosts, who have gone as far as comparing the FBI to Russia’s KGB spy agency, slinging false accusations of corruption, and calling for the firing of special counsel Robert Mueller.

In fact, according to one analysis , Hannity has made at least 183 statements since May accusing Mueller of having a "conflict of interest" and suggesting that he should step down or be fired.

These attacks have only escalated as the Russia probe creeps closer to Trump's inner circle.

As Napolitano said, Mueller's probe clearly has a bigger target — and no matter how much spin Fox News puts on it, the investigation shows no signs of slowing down anytime soon.