Former Deadspin editor Timothy Burke gave his first interview Wednesday after his home was raided in May in connection with the Tucker Carlson leaks from Fox News.
In an appearance on The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz, Burke would neither confirm nor deny he was ever in possession of the leaks of Carlson published by Media Matters after the host’s late April ouster from Fox News.
He did, however, note that he has made powerful enemies during his time as a digital journalist. He was asked if he thought Fox News has outsourced the federal government to serve as its quasi-internal investigator and said we will eventually know whether that is what happened or not.
“I brought this upon myself. This comes with the territory,” admitted Burke. “I don’t know what actual procedures happen to lead to 20 some FBI agents showing up in my house on Monday morning. I hope that we learned those very soon.”
Burke added that Fox News is in a delicate state after its $787.5 million settlement with Dominion Voting Systems and was looking to strike back where it could.
“Let’s be honest, Fox News is in a bit of a crisis. They just had to pay out like three-quarters of a billion dollars to Dominion. Smartmatic is next in line with their defamation suit. They’ve got a long string of sexual harassment suits that they got to deal with,” Burke continued. “This is sort of a — you got the injured bear. We’ll find out eventually, but you would hope that the federal government and its policies and procedures that we have put in place to protect people who are engaging in the First Amendment like me, you would hope that those things would supersede the ability of a corporation to try to exact revenge on somebody who’s embarrassed it.”
After being without his phone or computers for 75 days, Burke said he is just ready to move on and return to his profession.
“I want to get back out there and doing the things that I’ve been doing on Twitter for more than 15 years of presenting breaking news and alerting people to what’s happening in their communities. That’s what I want to get back to and I hope and I know that eventually, cooler heads are going to prevail in this. People are gonna realize what this is about. And I’m gonna get my stuff back and maybe an apology,” he concluded. “An apology would be nice I think.”
Burke is accused of hacking into Fox News to obtain a series of videos that aimed to paint Carlson in a negative light after his April firing. In the videos, Carlson asks a Fox News makeup artist if she ever had a pillow fight. Another showed him denigrating the FOX Nation streaming service, while another showed Kanye West making misogynistic and anti-Semitic comments while appearing with Carlson for an interview.
Some conservative pundits accused Fox News executives of leaking the videos to defame Carlson. However, a Department of Justice investigation ultimately led back to Burke as the culprit.
