House Democratic Leaders Demand 'Corrupt' Trump FCC Chair Resign After Kimmel Firing

Democratic leaders in the House of Representatives on Thursday issued a joint statement demanding the resignation of Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr over his role in getting ABC to suspend late-night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel.

The statement, which was signed by Reps. Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), Katherine Clark (D-Mass.), Pete Aguilar (D-Calif.), Ted Lieu (D-Calif.), Joe Neguse (D-Colo.) and Suzan DelBene (D-Wash.), accused Carr of corruption with his overt threats against ABC unless the network stopped airing Kimmel's show.

"Brendan Carr, the so-called chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, has engaged in the corrupt abuse of power," they said. "He has disgraced the office he holds by bullying ABC, the employer of Jimmy Kimmel, and forcing the company to bend the knee to the Trump administration."

The Democrats also took shots at ABC for so quickly caving to pressure from the Trump administration and vowed to investigate the incident.

"Media companies, such as the one that suspended Mr. Kimmel, have a lot to explain," they said. "The censoring of artists and cancellation of shows is an act of cowardice. It may also be part of a corrupt pay-to-play scheme. House Democrats will make sure the American people learn the truth, even if that requires the relentless unleashing of congressional subpoena power. This will not be forgotten."

ABC announced that Kimmel would be suspended indefinitely just hours after car told right-wing influencer Benny Johnson in a podcast episode that the network could have its broadcast license revoked unless Kimmel was taken off the air.

"There’s actions we can take on licensed broadcasters," Carr said. "And frankly, I think that it's sort of really past time that a lot of these licensed broadcasters themselves push back on Comcast and Disney and say... we are not going to run Kimmel anymore until you straighten this out because we licensed broadcasters are running the possibility of fines or license revocation from the FCC if we continue to run content that ends up being a pattern of these distortions."

The Trump administration has shown no intention of backing off its threats to broadcasters that air content it deems objectionable, and on Thursday morning White House Faith Liaison Jenny Korn hailed the suspension of Kimmel during an appearance on Newsmax while suggesting it was proper retaliation for his remarks about the slain right-wing activist Charlie Kirk.

"Thank goodness for companies now who are firing nurses and teachers and people like Jimmy Kimmel, because people should not be able to celebrate others' deaths in a very public way and then keep their jobs," she said.

Kimmel never celebrated Kirk’s murder and explicitly condemned it, but drew the ire of conservatives this week when he mentioned how the far-right MAGA movement, including President Donald Trump, tried "to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and accused the right of trying "to score political points" from the killing. Activists claimed the remark suggested that the suspect in the killing, Tyler Robinson, could have been a Republican.

Leaked chats between Robinson and his roommate on Tuesday suggested that the suspect wasn't "firmly aligned with any political movement at all," as one journalist said.