Tucker Carlson says he lies when ‘I’m really cornered or something’

Fox News’s Tucker Carlson admitted he sometimes lies when he is “really cornered or something” in a new interview with “The Rubin Report” published Sunday.

“I lie. If I’m really cornered or something, I lie. I really try not to. I try never to lie on TV. I just don’t, you know, I don’t like lying. I certainly do it, you know, out of weakness or whatever,” Carlson said.

The revelation came after host Dave Rubin asked the prime-time Fox News anchor how CNN anchors Brian Stelter, Don Lemon and Chris Cuomo “live with themselves at this point when they just lie again and again and we have the internet to expose the lies.”

Carlson then went on to allege that the aforementioned individuals chose to lie to “protect the system.”

“So, if these people ask themselves, ‘Why am I doing this?’ and they say, ‘Well, because I want to protect the system because I really believe in the system,’ OK, who’s running the system? You’re lying to defend Jeff Bezos? Like you’re treating Bill Gates like some moral leader? Like are you kidding?” he said.

“How dare you do that. How dare you use your power to protect and guard the powerful even as you clamp to, you know, put your boot on the neck of the weakest … some Catholic school kid from Kentucky? It’s like a parody. Are you kidding?” he added, apparently referring to standoff between a high schooler and a Native American protester that received wide coverage in 2019.

Carlson’s comments come months after a U.S. district judge tossed a defamation lawsuit brought against Fox News by former Playboy model Karen McDougal — who received a $150,000 payoff to suppress her claim that she had an affair with then-candidate Donald Trump before his presidency —  claiming that Carlson slandered her when he referred to her situation as a “classic case of extortion.”

In her decision, Judge Mary Kay Vyskocil cited arguments from Fox News’s lawyers contending that the “‘general tenor’ of the show should then inform a viewer that [Carlson] is not ‘stating actual facts’ about the topics he discusses and is instead engaging in ‘exaggeration’ and ‘non-literal commentary,'” according to NPR.

“Fox persuasively argues, that given Mr. Carlson’s reputation, any reasonable viewer ‘arrive[s] with an appropriate amount of skepticism’ about the statement he makes,” she added.

Carlson made headlines last month when the National Security Agency’s inspector general announced that it was launching an investigation into what it said was “alleged targeting” of a U.S. member of the media after the Fox News anchor claimed that the agency was spying on him earlier in this year.

The Hill reached out to Fox News and CNN for comment.