Laura Ingraham attacked the WaPo for 'illegal leaks' after report Trump held onto nuclear docs at Mar-a-Lago

• Laura Ingraham and her Fox News guests were angered by a Washington Post report on Tuesday. 
• They rubbished a story claiming Trump had a document about a foreign power's nuclear capacities.
• Ingraham accused the reporters of "working in tandem" with the government to attack Trump.

Laura Ingraham and guests to her Fox News show have played down explosive reporting that former President Donald Trump kept nuclear secrets at Mar-a-Lago.

Her report aired Tuesday, soon after The Washington Post reported that a document about a foreign nation's nuclear military capacities was among those seized during the FBI's raid on Mar-a-Lago. The papers are so top secret, only a handful of top-level officials would have access to them, the paper claimed. 

Ingraham introduced the topic by way of a "Fox News alert" ahead of "The Ingraham Angle," but her lead wasn't about national security.

"The prosecution of Donald Trump by DOJ via media leaks continues tonight," Ingraham said, going on to briefly outline what the Post had reported. 

She brought in views from former White House advisor Steven Miller, conservative commentator Victor Davis Hanson, among others, who roundly trashed the report.

"As we just observed time and time again over the past — what, seven years now? — the regime media stenographers were ready to feed the cycle of leaks," she said.

The segment hinged around a broad and unevidenced theory pointing to the idea that the "Beltway media," the White House, and the Department of Justice are colluding to jail Trump by any means necessary. The Biden White House has said it had no advance notice of the raid.

Ingraham also mocked the Post's sources, which were identified in the paper's story only as "people familiar with the investigation." The Post's policy on anonymous sources allows this only in tightly defined circumstances, and asks reporters to weigh up whether the public interest in the story is worth the cost to public trust. 

Ingraham played a clip of reporter Carol Leonnig on another network, outlining the basics — and limits — of what she had reported.

"She doesn't know anything," said Ingraham in reaction, going on to compare Leonnig to a famed CBS war-era correspondent.

"She was given information by either someone at the White House who was fed it [...] but she's acting like she's Edward R. Murrow doing, like, gumshoe reporting here. She isn't doing anything. She's just being spoon-fed information."

Ingraham's guest Hanson also suggested hypocrisy in the Post's article's other reporter, Devlin Barrett, on the basis that Barrett had written a book critical of the FBI's handling of the Clinton email investigation.

Devlin was "telling us not to trust the FBI because they leaked on Hillary Clinton," said Hanson. "Their credibility is not very good."

"You see how it all works, they work in tandem together," Ingraham later said. "This is constantly the case with anything related to Donald Trump."

"It's been one salacious, manipulated, fabricated leak after another," said Miller, without providing evidence of fabrication.

DoJ leakers are "the ultimate perversion of justice," he said, calling on Attorney General Merrick Garland to impanel a grand jury to prosecute leakers. 

Prior to the Mar-a-Lago raid, Fox News appeared to be souring on Trump, as several media commentators noted.

But the execution of the August 8 search warrant has produced a series of stinging attacks on the decision from its opinion-heavy primetime lineup, which soaks up much of the network's viewership.

Two days after the raid, Jesse Watters led with his "hunch" that the FBI planted documents during the search — a move for which no evidence has ever emerged.

On Tucker Carlson's show on August 12, a doctored picture of the judge who signed off on the warrant was aired, which was only corrected when Sean Hannity said he was "guessing" it was fake.