BS BULLETIN
- Bill O’Reilly’s fury over Sen. Jon Ossoff’s swipe at White House aide Natalie Harp produced one whopper: O’Reilly said he would vote for Vladimir Putin before Ossoff.
- Chris Cuomo confronted him with the obvious problem — Putin is an authoritarian leader widely accused of responsibility for killings and political repression — prompting O’Reilly to retreat to: “I might stay home.”
- Beneath the made-for-TV exchange is the continuing fight over Ossoff’s decision to single out Harp, a taxpayer-paid White House aide, in a campaign attack on Trump.
Bill O’Reilly wanted to make a point about how little he thinks of Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff.
He may have made it a little too well.
O’Reilly joined Chris Cuomo on NewsNation Thursday, where Cuomo confronted him over his declaration earlier in the week that he would rather vote for Russian President Vladimir Putin than Ossoff.
“You’d vote for Vladimir Putin, who is a murderer,” Cuomo said. “You’d vote for a murderer over a U.S. Senator.”
Suddenly, O’Reilly discovered a third candidate. “Well, when you frame it that way I might stay home,” he replied.“Probably a good call, Bill,” Cuomo shot back.
Okay, Chris gets that round.
O’Reilly’s original broadside came amid the increasingly bizarre political brawl surrounding Natalie Harp, President Donald Trump’s 35-year-old executive assistant.
At a campaign rally Sunday, Ossoff was hammering Trump over the Iran war when he declared that the president “doesn’t want to do the job” and instead wants to “build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace gifted by the Emir of Qatar.”
The remark immediately exploded.
Trump allies interpreted the reference to Harp as a personal and sexually suggestive innuendo aimed at a female staffer. The White House erupted, conservative commentators piled on, and Ossoff subsequently argued that his point concerned Harp’s influence and what he describes as a circle of aides who reinforce Trump’s views.
O’Reilly was among those who thought Ossoff crossed a line. He called the senator’s comment a “gutter snipe statement” and defended Harp as someone he personally knows. “This woman is working for her country, whether you like the Trump administration or not,” O’Reilly said. “She has no history of doing anything untoward — none.”
Then came the line destined to overwhelm everything else he said: “I’d vote for Putin over Ossoff.”
Cuomo wasn’t about to let that one disappear. But after O’Reilly conceded that perhaps staying home would be preferable to casting the imaginary Putin ballot, the argument shifted back to Harp.
O’Reilly told Cuomo that Harp is extraordinarily hardworking and defended his objection to Ossoff’s rhetoric. Cuomo countered that the outrage was hypocritical given Trump’s own long history of insulting women.
“The idea that you or a Scott Jennings have your panties in a bunch over what Ossoff said about a woman connected to the president when this man does nothing but denigrate women for sport on a regular basis,” Cuomo said.
“Oh, here we go,” O’Reilly responded, pointing out that he has criticized Trump himself. “It matters,” Cuomo insisted. “It’s a little rich, Bill.”
There is a substantive issue underneath all this yelling.
Harp isn’t simply an anonymous private citizen who wandered into a campaign speech. She is a White House official, officially serving as special assistant and executive assistant to the president, and reporting describes her as one of Trump’s closest aides, frequently traveling with him and supplying him with information and printouts.
That makes her role and influence legitimate subjects for political scrutiny.
Whether Ossoff needed the loaded “travel with Natalie” formulation to make that argument is a different question — and precisely why the remark generated so much attention.
Ossoff isn’t backing away. He has since described Harp and other administration officials as “sycophantic aides” who tell Trump what he wants to hear rather than what he needs to hear.
Meanwhile, Harp has gone from being an obscure presidential assistant to one of Washington’s most talked-about figures in less than a week. And Bill O’Reilly managed to turn the whole controversy into a hypothetical American election featuring Vladimir Putin.
Politics in 2026 apparently wasn’t interesting enough already.
DBS WIRE SOURCES:
- Mediaite — ‘You Would Vote for a Murderer?!’ Chris Cuomo confronts Bill O’Reilly for saying he’d support Putin over Ossoff
- TheWrap — Chris Cuomo slams Bill O’Reilly for saying he’d support Putin over Ossoff
- CBS News — Who is Trump aide Natalie Harp? Loyal assistant suddenly in the spotlight
- CNN — Who is Natalie Harp? Ossoff ignites personal feud over Trump’s aide
