MSNBC’s Hugh Hewitt Under Fire: Softball-Laced McMaster Interview Demonstrates GOP Establishment’s Favorite Defender’s Weaknesses

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Matthew Boyle
Washington, D.C.

MSNBC’s favorite establishment Republican defender, Hugh Hewitt, is flailing after he failed to ask embattled National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster about his purge of loyalists to President Donald Trump from the National Security Council (NSC) during his interview with him this weekend.

Breitbart News’s Kristina Wong, our Pentagon correspondent, correctly noted in a piece over the weekend that Hewitt failed to ask McMaster during his interview about the purge of Trump loyalists—while McMaster installs more holdovers from the Barack Obama administration into the NSC. McMaster’s interview with Hewitt aired on Saturday morning on MSNBC.

Hewitt has come under fire many times before over the past several years, while winning praise from the left, for his work to hurt conservatives and protect the establishment. For instance, Hewitt this month was praised, as Breitbart News’s Tony Lee has reported, by Center for American Progress executive Daniella Gibbs Leger. Lee’s piece walks through a lot of the history of Hewitt, including how the National Journal has detailed–as Julia Hahn, a now former Breitbart News reporter who works in President Trump’s White House, previously reported–how Hewitt is the “Republican establishment’s go-to pundit.”

Hahn’s piece, from 2015, recalls how Hewitt said in August 2015 that he did not believe now President Donald Trump had the “temperament” to be President of the United States. Hewitt was clearly very wrong about that.

But Lee’s piece from last week on Breitbart News details even more troubling things that Hewitt has done over the years, including his claim after the murder of Kate Steinle in San Francisco that Republicans should not focus on the threat of illegal immigration to Americans’ safety.

Hewitt, as Lee noted, wrote in July 2015 that Steinle’s “slaying by an oft-deported illegal immigrant felon should not prompt Republican presidential candidates to become amplifiers for that small slice of the electorate which sincerely believes illegal immigration is the most pressing issue facing the country.”

President Trump, of course, campaigned on highlighting exactly what Hewitt advised Republicans not to–and he won the presidency, where many other GOP politicians have failed.

So that is why it is no surprise that Hewitt is up to his same old tricks again, this time with McMaster. In response to Wong’s Breitbart News reporting on his McMaster interview, Hewitt—under fire for his odd defense of the beleaguered McMaster—Tweeted at Wong to say he taped his interview with McMaster on early Wednesday afternoon.

While news had not yet broken of McMaster’s purge of Ezra Cohen-Watnick from the NSC, he had already long ago purged fellow Trump loyalists Rich Higgins and Derek Harvey in the previous weeks. News was out everywhere in major publications including The Atlantic about why. Hewitt’s failure to press McMaster on this question does no service to the truth or to conservatism. Earth to Hewitt: Was firing two loyalists to President Trump—which we knew about by then—not enough to ask about this?

What is particularly refreshing, though, is that most people–based upon the replies to Hewitt’s own Tweet–are not falling for Hewitt’s games.

Hewitt has long been viewed, as one White House official told Breitbart News over the weekend, as the “last refuge of a scoundrel” in the GOP establishment or globalist elite. He frequently hosts softball interviews with House Speaker Paul Ryan, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), and other globalists throughout the Republican Party in an attempt to normalize them to the GOP base.

Since then, however, and more importantly: All sorts of more serious revelations about McMaster, including his connections with Democratic mega-donor billionaire George Soros, have been revealed. Will Hewitt mention those on his various platforms?

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