CNN’s Abby Phillip Calls BS When Scott Jennings Defends Trump FBI Pick Over QAnon Accusations

CNN anchor Abby Phillip called BS when Scott Jennings defended Kash Patel— President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee for FBI director —  over his praise for QAnon.

Phillip’s program has become a frequent source of ideological free-for-alls between provocative and ideologically opposed regular panelists and guests. On Thursday night’s edition of CNN NewsNight, Phillip’s panel included Scott Jennings, Maria Cardona, Anthony Tarallucci, John Brabender, and Mondaire Jones.

Donie O’Sullivan joined the panel for the Kash Patel segment, which began with a montage of the nominee praising Q — the mysterious alleged figure behind the conspiracy theories:

KASH PATEL, TRUMP’S FBI DIRECTOR PICK (voice-over): Whether it’s the Qs of the world who I agree with some of what he does and I disagree with some of what he does, if it allows people to gather and focus on the truth and the facts. I’m all for it.

WARREN: Q has been so right on so many things. I’ll get off that subject.

PATEL: No, he has. And I agree with you. He has. He has. And you got to take a bit, you got to harness that following that Q has garnered and just sort of tweak it a little bit. That’s all I’m saying.

PATEL: People keep asking me about all this Q stuff. I’m like, what does it matter? What I’m telling you is that there is truth in a lot of things that many people say. And what I’m putting out there is the truth. And how about we have some fun along the way. There’s so many people who subscribe to the, where we go on, we go on all mantra. And it’s a — it’s what’s wrong with it.

Jennings and Brabender tried to downplay the QAnon praise, while Jennings cited denials of a “connection to Q” — which Phillip pushed back on:

PHILLIP: Yes, shared beliefs, even if it’s completely made up.

JENNINGS: Well, hopefully we’re not disqualifying people from serving or trying to sell books, because, Lord have mercy. Virtually everybody who gets nominated for something has a book. I would just point out two things.

One, politically, Patel, to me right now, has a lot of support in the Senate. I think a lot of these nominees, you know, some are in trouble. I don’t think he is right now. I mean, he’s going to obviously have to go to the table and answer questions just like everybody else, but there is enthusiasm for him.

Ten years ago, the FBI had a 59 percent approval rating. Today, it’s like 41 percent. There’s a lot of restoration work that needs to be done to restore public confidence in this agency. It probably does need a change agent, an outside change agent, and the Republicans right now, they like this nomination. There’s a long way to go, but they like it right now.

PHILLIP: This is kind of like how, you know, you tell everybody that elections are rigged and then when confidence in elections go down, we’re like, everybody, we need to change elections.

JENNINGS: Are you saying the FBI hasn’t made any mistakes?

PHILLIP: I’m just saying, when you spend years and years telling everybody the FBI is corrupt, they’re going to believe you, so —

JENNINGS: They have admitted some corruption. There have been internal reports where they have admitted there have been FBI agents that themselves have gotten criminal in trouble. They made mistakes.

PHILLIP: Yes, I actually think that’s exactly the correct point, which is that the FBI has a process for going over their own misdeeds. And they did it multiple times in the case of the accusations that Trump has made about the agency, including in the John Durham report, which was heralded by Republicans.

That was an attempt to look at all of these things. And he found problems.

JENNINGS: Right.

PHILLIP: That’s called a process.

JONES: — process — don’t cover that now. The other piece of this is, I just want to go back to something Maria said earlier, you know, and my friend Scott says the president should get to a point whoever he wants to lead an agency.

And there’s a lot to that. But again, I still don’t have an explanation for why the guy to lead the FBI would be someone who believes that there’s a secret group of Satan worshipping pedophiles who is like controlling the world order. I mean that is literally what an admirer of the QAnon movement is supporting here in the case of Kash Patel.

JENNINGS: Literally on the record — literally an on the record denial of connections, right, between from the Trump transition between Patel and this.

UNKNOWN: We saw footage of it.

JENNINGS: Literally on the record.

UNKNOWN: We saw footage of it.

BRABENDER: He said I disagree with them on a lot of things.

UNKNOWN: I’m glad we have the tape that we just saw in this intro.

PHILLIP: But I think that — yes, I mean, I think that’s part of the point is that there’s — I don’t know about connections to QAnon, because it’s not really a real thing, but he’s talked favorably about it.

Watch above via CNN NewsNight.