US Senator Ted Cruz has accused the head of America’s broadcast regulator of acting like “a mafioso” in the suspension of late-night host Jimmy Kimmel – the sharpest attack yet from a conservative Republican on the controversy.
He said Federal Communications Commission (FCC) chairman Brendan Carr’s threat to ABC over their comedian’s monologue about slain conservative influencer Charlie Kirk was “dangerous as hell”.
“That’s right out of Goodfellas,” the Texas Republican said, as he affected a mobster’s accent.
Other Republicans in Congress have been more muted in their criticism of how the FCC pressed Disney-owned ABC to take action on Kimmel, who was indefinitely suspended on Wednesday.
The row started after Kimmel said in his monologue on Monday that the “Maga gang” were “desperately trying to characterise this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them” and trying to “score political points from it”.
He also likened Trump’s reaction to the conservative political activist’s death to “how a four-year-old mourns a goldfish”.
Brendan Carr called those comments “sick” and threatened to take action because the host had appeared to “directly mislead the American public”.
Conservative critics say Kimmel was pushing a false narrative by suggesting the suspect in the Kirk killing was a “Make America Great Again” Republican. While the exact motive is still not known, on Sunday – before Kimmel spoke – the Utah governor had said the suspect was “indoctrinated by leftist ideology”.
The FCC is in charge of granting broadcast licences to networks such as ABC, NBC and CBS, and they are required under statute to be in the public interest.
On his podcast Verdict with Ted Cruz, the senator emphasised on Friday that he hated what Kimmel said about Kirk, and he is “thrilled that he was fired”. He also said Carr was “a good guy”.
“But what he [Carr] said there is dangerous as hell,” Cruz added. “And so he threatens, explicitly, we’re going to cancel ABC’s licence.
“We’re going to take them off the air so ABC cannot broadcast anymore. He says we can do this the easy way, or we could do this the hard way, yeah. And I got to say that’s right out of Goodfellas.
“That’s right out of a mafioso coming into a bar going, nice bar you have here, it’d be a shame if something happened to it,” he added, using a mobster voice.
He warned that if the government gets into the business of bans and regulating what the media says “that will end up bad for conservatives”.
“Going down this road, there will come a time when a Democrat wins again – wins the White House … they will silence us. They will use this power, and they will use it ruthlessly. And that is dangerous,” Cruz said.
In the Oval Office on Friday, President Donald Trump defended Carr and said “I disagree with Ted Cruz”, who is ordinarily one of his staunchest allies.
Another Republican Senator, Thom Tillis of North Carolina, told reporters that Cruz was “absolutely right” in his criticism of Carr.
Tillis, who will not seek re-election next year, said the FCC chairman’s comments were “just unacceptable behaviour”.
Republicans in Congress have generally been toeing the party line with their response to Kimmel’s suspension as the nation is shaken by the political and cultural aftershocks of Kirk’s killing.
But Senator Jerry Moran, a Republican from Kansas, sounded a note of caution on Thursday.
“The conservative position is free speech is free speech, and we better be very careful about any lines we cross in diminishing free speech,” Moran told Politico.
South Dakota Senator Mike Rounds said he would approach it as an “employer-employee issue”.
Kimmel has not publicly commented about his suspension, but his late-night colleagues – including Jon Stewart, Jimmy Fallon and Stephen Colbert – responded on Thursday with a show of solidarity.
Kirk was fatally shot on 10 September during an open-air event on a Utah college campus.
On Thursday, the Senate passed a resolution to designate 14 October – Kirk’s birthday – a day of remembrance for him.
Lawmakers in the US House of Representatives approved the resolution, but nearly 100 Democrats opposed it.
In Sacramento, California, police said three shots were fired on Friday afternoon into a window of an ABC10 building while people were inside.
The shots came from a moving vehicle and nobody was injured, police said.
It was not immediately clear if the shooting was a targeted attack or an accidental discharge of a weapon.
ABC10 is an affiliate operated by Nexstar, one of the major media companies that cancelled Jimmy Kimmel Live! from its markets this week, citing the host’s “offensive and insensitive” comments about Kirk.
