Source item

The Trump administration illegally had me banned from Fox News, then committed another crime to cover up the evidence of the first. Trump ran for office promising to protect freedom of speech. The most important speech that must be protected is criticism of the government. On Dec. 6, 2025, I appeared on Fox & Friends to discuss inflation. I had been a guest on the same show about two weeks earlier. During that interview, I made the factually accurate statement that consumer prices had continued to rise since Trump was elected president for a second time. Trump immediately took to Truth Social to reply that I was a jerk, a loser, and a Trump hater because consumer prices were actually substantially lower than when he took office. He questioned why Fox News would have someone like me on and publicly chastised the person who booked me. Since then, none of my contacts at Fox & Friends will even return my emails. I’m sure they are all afraid of losing their jobs if they do. On January 19 I submitted a FOIA request seeking “copies of all records, including but not limited to emails, text messages, chat messages, memos, call notes, meeting notes, calendar entries, and any other written or electronic communications, from or to Jonathan Coppage (and/or any other FHFA employee) that relate to Peter Schiff, including records specifically relating to Peter Schiff’s appearance on Fox News “Fox & Friends” on December 6, 2025. I received an initial response on May 6th claiming that not a single document responsive to my request existed. I followed up by explaining that I knew Jonathan Coopage had emailed Grabbien about my appearance because I had already seen a copy of that email. Today I received their final response, which included only the email I already knew existed—the same email that prompted my FOIA request in the first place. There is no way this was the only record responsive to my request. First, their response omitted the email Grabbien must have sent in reply. It is also not credible that no other emails exist or that there were no other communications among the parties, either before or after this email was sent, concerning the very clip they had requested and received. There should be national outrage that a sitting U.S. president would have a private citizen banned from a major news network for speaking critically of his economic policies, especially when the criticism is factual. There should also be outrage that the president’s staff would engage in an illegal cover-up to conceal evidence of presidential censorship. Let’s see if there is at least one ethical journalist who actually believes in freedom of speech and is willing to investigate this. JD Vance recently downplayed the Watergate cover-up, claiming that if it happened now, it would be merely a “12-hour news story” and that it would be “crazy” to think it could bring down a presidency. Well, I think this cover-up is even worse—as is the conduct being covered up! I left out that Jonathan Coopage is the Communicatoins director of the FHFA and that Nicholas Jacobs is a Senior Communications Specialist at the FHFA.