Laura Ingraham attacked WaPo over 'illegal leaks' after a report said Trump held on to nuclear docs at Mar-a-Lago

• Laura Ingraham and her Fox News guests were angered Tuesday by a Washington Post report.
• They criticized a story saying Trump had a document about a foreign power's nuclear capacities.

Laura Ingraham and guests on her Fox News show Tuesday played down explosive reporting that said former President Donald Trump kept nuclear secrets at Mar-a-Lago.

Her report aired soon after The Washington Post reported a document about a foreign nation's nuclear military capacities was among those seized during the FBI's raid on Mar-a-Lago. The papers are so secret, only a handful of top-level officials would have access to them, the newspaper said.

Ingraham introduced the topic with a "Fox News Alert" banner ahead of "The Ingraham Angle," but her lead wasn't about national security.

"The prosecution of Donald Trump by DOJ via media leaks continues tonight," Ingraham said, going on to briefly outline what The Post reported.

She brought in views from the former White House advisor Stephen Miller and the conservative commentator Victor Davis Hanson, among others who roundly trashed the report.

"As we just observed time and time again over the past — what, seven years now? — the regime media stenographers were ready to feed the cycle of leaks," she said.

The segment hinged on a broad and baseless theory that Washington's "Beltway media," the White House, and the Justice Department are colluding to jail Trump by any means necessary. The Biden White House has said it had no advance notice of the raid.

Ingraham also mocked The Post's sources, which were identified in the paper's story only as "people familiar with the investigation." The Post's policy on anonymous sources allows this only in tightly defined circumstances and asks reporters to weigh whether the public interest in the story is worth the cost to public trust.

Ingraham played a clip of the reporter Carol Leonnig from another network outlining the basics — and limits — of what she had reported.

"She doesn't know anything," Ingraham said, comparing Leonnig to a famed CBS war-era correspondent.

"She was given information by either someone at the White House who was fed it ... but she's acting like she's Edward R. Murrow doing, like, gumshoe reporting here," she added. "She isn't doing anything. She's just being spoon-fed information."

Ingraham's guest Hanson also suggested the Post article's other reporter, Devlin Barrett, was hypocritical in the report, pointing to Barrett's book that criticized the FBI's handling of the investigation into former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's emails.

Barrett was "telling us not to trust the FBI because they leaked on Hillary Clinton," Hanson said, adding: "Their credibility is not very good."

Ingraham later said: "You see how it all works. They work in tandem together. This is constantly the case with anything related to Donald Trump."

"It's been one salacious, manipulated, fabricated leak after another," Miller said, without providing evidence of fabrication.

Justice Department leakers are "the ultimate perversion of justice," he added, calling on Attorney General Merrick Garland to impanel a grand jury to prosecute leakers.

Before the Mar-a-Lago raid, Fox News appeared to be souring on Trump, as several media commentators noted.

But the execution of the August 8 search warrant has produced a series of stinging attacks on the decision from its opinion-heavy prime-time lineup, which soaks up much of the network's viewership.

Two days after the raid, the Fox News commentator Jesse Watters led his show with his "hunch" that the FBI planted documents during the search — a move for which no evidence has emerged.

On Tucker Carlson's show on August 12, a doctored picture of the judge who signed off on the warrant was aired, which was corrected only when Sean Hannity said he was "guessing" it was fake.