Fox's new Trump defender fails miserably on her very first day

Tomi Lahren, the 25-year-old conservative who is best known for being fired from Glenn Beck’s The Blaze and for being forced to admit that she benefits from Obamacare despite her persistent bashing of it, made her debut as a Fox News contributor on Sean Hannity’s show Wednesday night.

And she accidentally confessed that the yearslong obsession with Hillary Clinton’s emails, and Benghazi, is nothing more than a partisan political tactic, thereby undermining a major Republican talking point.

.@TomiLahren: “How about when the mainstream media stops covering Russia day in and day out, maybe we can drop the Hillary email scandal.” pic.twitter.com/OwfYWfuhDD

— Fox News (@FoxNews) August 31, 2017

LAHREN: I have some friends that spent a few hours in Benghazi and would really like to know what was in those emails. And they’d really like to know why she deleted them. So to say that the public doesn’t have a right to know, or that we’re not interested, that’s a load of crap, number one. Number two: How about we make a deal? How about when the mainstream media stops covering Russia day in and day out, maybe we can drop the Hillary email scandal. But until then, I think I’m going to stay on it.

Putting aside the obvious question about whether she has friends who spent “a few hours in Benghazi,” Lahren’s mini speech is a remarkable unforced error.

If, as Donald Trump and his campaign and his supporters and his Republican enablers in Congress and in the world of right-wing media have all claimed, Hillary Clinton’s use of emails is in fact one of the most egregious crimes in American history — and it’s not — then why would Republicans want to make any kind of deal to drop it?

Trump threatened, during the campaign, that if he were elected, he would direct his Department of Justice to investigate Clinton, even though the Department of Justice has already investigated her. As has Congress.

Those investigations did not produce the desired results, which is why conservatives have chosen to ignore them, insisting that further investigations are necessary — and conveniently invoking Clinton’s name to try to deflect from Trump’s scandals.

But it really says something that Lahren would even suggest that she and her “friends” would drop their obsession with Clinton in exchange for dropping the ongoing investigations into the Trump campaign’s collusion with Russia and Trump’s obstruction of justice to try to make those investigations disappear.

Either Lahren knows Trump must be guilty, which is why she’d suggest such a trade, or she knows the Clinton email scandals were never a real concern to begin with.

Or perhaps the young and eager Trump defender is not quite ready for prime time just yet.