MSNBC has been forced to issue a retraction after the liberal show “Morning Joe” pushed a false claim about FBI Director Kash Patel.
The show issued the retraction after airing an unverified and ultimately false claim about Patel by former FBI official Frank Figliuzzi.
However, the correction follows three days of widespread media repetition of Figliuzzi’s false allegation.
Figliuzzi claimed that Patel was spending more time at nightclubs than managing the bureau.
The claim was made during Friday’s broadcast of “Morning Joe.”
The former FBI official alleged that Patel was “more visible at nightclubs far more than he has been on the seventh floor of the Hoover building.”
Figliuzzi previously served as assistant director of the FBI’s Counterintelligence Division from 2011 to 2012.
He now works as an NBC News analyst and has never served under Patel at the FBI.
As is typical at MSNBC, Figliuzzi was not asked to provide any supporting evidence for the fabricated statement.
Figliuzzi also claimed that Patel’s daily intelligence briefings had been reduced from daily to “maybe twice weekly.”
Again, he cited anonymous sources and offered no proof.
Yet, despite the complete lack of evidence, those remarks quickly circulated across digital news platforms