Monica Crowley is insisting that the plagiarism scandal that cost her a job as President Trump’s national security spokesperson was a “political hit job.”
The conservative pundit broke her silence on the controversy Tuesday night during an appearance on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show.
“What happened to me was a despicable, straight-up political hit job, OK?” Crowley said. “It’s been debunked, my editor has completely supported me and backed me up.”
Crowley backed out of her job as spokesperson for the National Security Council in mid-January after CNN and Politico revealed multiple instances of plagiarism in her Ph.D. dissertation, her new book and newspaper columns.
{mosads}The plagiarism allegations, however, have not been debunked. Her book, “What the (Bleep) Just Happened?”, is no longer being offered for sale until Crowley has the chance to “source and revise the material,” publisher HarperCollins said in January.
But the former Fox News contributor maintained that her ouster was the result of a “poisonous atmosphere of personal destruction in Washington and the media.”
“The attack on me was a test,” she told Hannity. “What happened to me, what happened to General [Michael] Flynn, what’s happened to Attorney General [Jeff] Sessions and others is all of a piece. There is a very dangerous and very effective destabilization campaign underway against this president, his administration and his agenda.”
Crowley said Trump’s opponents are seeking to put him “in prison.”
“I hope the president understands this, having been a victim of this myself,” she said. “They are out for blood.”