After the hosts of The Five suggested during a Friday segment that the Biden administration is overblowing Vladimir Putin’s intentions in Ukraine, Fox News National Security Correspondent Jennifer Griffin joined the segment and launched into a nearly 4-minute debunking of their dismissals, and she sounded quite annoyed and frustrated at their apparent lack of knowledge about the facts on the ground.
The panel was reacting to a speech President Biden gave where he said he’s “convinced” that Putin has already “made the decision” to invade Ukraine. Cohosts Greg Gutfeld and Kennedy suggested Biden is exaggerating or even faking the threat of an invasion in order to distract from the Durham investigation.
“There’s something else going on here that is–that feels very, very manufactured,” said Gutfeld. “And I don’t know what it is.”
“I know what it is. It’s Jake Sullivan,” Kennedy replied. “Jake Sullivan is the national security adviser, and he is in deep yogurt in the Durham probe, and he’s been the one saying, ‘We have so much intelligence an invasion is imminent.’ He said that last Friday. It’s the next Friday, here we are. I don’t think Putin is going to invade.”
Soon after, Griffin joined the segment and completely demolished the notion that the Ukraine crisis is a ploy by the Biden administration to distract from Durham.
“First of all, I need to level set with the conversation I’ve just been listening to,” Griffin said as the panel sat and listened. “What we are witnessing right now is not something that’s changed in the last 24 hours. If you go back to notes that I’ve been sending out for the last two weeks, this is something we’ve been watching in terms of you have commercial satellite imagery, you have the buildup of forces, the type of forces, the numbers of forces, things that we’ve been told in advance to look for in terms of some of the disinformation that is already starting to appear, the false flag operations in the Donbas region. All of that is ticking up.”
“I’ve heard comparisons to the Iraq war, and WMD, and how do we know? We’re seeing it with our own eyes,” she continued later in the segment. “If you can’t look at the kind of the Iskander missile battalions that are now in Belarus [and] 30,000 Russian troops there. Half of [Putin’s] air force has now been deployed toward Ukraine. I am told just moments ago from a senior defense official that 40% of his 190,000 troops who are on the border with Ukraine are now in attack positions. That is something we have been waiting for.”
“Right now, every American should be watching this and knowing that this is deadly serious,” Griffin said. “This is not some wag-the-dog situation. To even mention the Durham probe in the same sentence as what we know, and what we can see with our own eyes in terms of the military buildup and knowing what Vladimir Putin is capable of — I served in Moscow from 1996 to ’99. I watched as Vladimir Putin rose. I remember the apartment blocks that were blown up by his KGB, his FSB as a pretext to go into Chechnya. Go look at those images of Chechnya and how carpet-bombed Chechnya was when the Russian military moves in. This is not a precision, small pinpointed strike. This will be the full weight of the Russian military going into Ukraine if someone doesn’t stop it in the coming days.”
When Griffin was finished, no one on the panel tried to challenge her assertions, and Five cohost Jesse Watters simply just ended the segment.
“Jennifer Griffin, thank you so much,” Watters said. “We appreciate it.”
In a 4 minute rant Fox National Security Correspondent Jennifer Griffin chews out the panel on Fox’s The Five for not taking the crisis in Ukraine seriously and connecting it to the Durham Report. #Fox #TheFive #DurhamReport #UkraineConflict #RealJournalist #ShamesTheFive pic.twitter.com/NZ9YfDckNz
— Decoding Fox News (@DecodingFoxNews) February 19, 2022
