We support our Publishers and Content Creators. You can view this story on their website by CLICKING HERE.

While the liberal broadcast and cable networks largely behaved themselves Thursday in their coverage of the official state funeral for late former President Jimmy Carter, there were a few wacky exceptions with CNN using the fact that Carter’s FBI director is still alive to bash President-Elect Trump demanding change at the agency.

CBS also had a few moments in political toolery with one moment insisting Carter was anything but “a weak President” and then another invoking the apocalyptic Los Angeles-area wildfires as proof Carter has been validated in his environmental views.

On CNN, special correspondent Jamie Gangel arrived at this topic when highlighting the fact that Carter outlived most of his staff and cabinet members, but three still alive would be in attendance with one being Judge William Webster, who served as FBI director from 1978 to 1987.

Gangel relayed a conversation she had with Webster and his wife about his role and that Carter “believed the FBI should be separate” from politics and the White House:

I spoke to Judge Webster and his wife Linda this past week. They told me two interesting stories. One, we should all keep in mind that Jimmy Carter, the Democrat, picked Judge Webster, the Republican, to be head of the FBI, knowing that Webster the Republican would go on for a 10 year service. It was a — you know, Jimmy Carter thought the man was right for the job. It wasn’t about politics and Linda Webster also told me one of their favorite stories is that Jimmy Carter never interfered with what Judge Webster did. He always worked through the Attorney General. He believed the FBI should be separate. And except once. Once President Carter, they don’t know why, called then-FBI Director Judge Webster to ask about something out West. And the FBI director said, if we can, we’ll do it and Jimmy Carter said — understood, you know, hands off. 

If it wasn’t already clear, Gangel would make the link to Trump: “Very different from today, where Christopher Wray is going to be resigning so that Donald Trump can appoint his own FBI director.”

The ridiculously partisan Abby Phillip — host of CNN NewsNight (aka CNN Thunderdome) — was all too eager to continue that saying that “[h]earing Jamie talk about his respect for the independence of the FBI, seeing Hunter Biden on the screen and some of those folks that we’ve just been discussing” struck a chord with her.

She added that Carter made “the independence of the FBI…a relatively new phenomenon,’ but still “so important for him to take those ideas and to hold fast to them so that they could become a part of the American system for decades after that.”

Unfortunately, Phillip argued, “we’re in another area” in which “all of [Carter’s values are] being revisited.”

“Perhaps all of that is being revisited, but one of the things about Jimmy Carter’s legacy throughout all of these things, whether it’s how he governed, how he thought about American energy, how he thought about the future, how he thought about the importance of science and engineering and future proofing this country, he saw beyond his four-year term,” she gushed.

Over on CBS, 60 Minutes correspondent Lesley Stahl — who covered Carter in the second half of his lone term — complained that for “all these years, he was looked upon as a weak president” and that presidents have been told not to end up like him.

Stahl argued the country has, decades later, “we’re really opening our eyes to what he accomplished and to what kind of a person, a man he was” and “accomplish[ed] so much more than we realized when he was president.”

“He turns out not to have been a weak president at all. He accomplished much more than we realized and you’ve talked about some of it. Some of it was that he brought human rights into the forefront of our foreign policy. He accomplished many acts that got passed on energy. He did the Camp David Accords and he stood for bipartisanship…[W]e need to remember the spirit that he brought to the presidency,” she said.

Later during the funeral, outgoing CBS Evening News anchor Norah O’Donnell and liberal historian Douglas Brinkley tag-teamed to tie the Los Angeles fires as validation of Carter’s beliefs about alternative energy and global warming (click “expand”):

O’DONNELL: I’m also struck too in — for a president who served our country almost half a century ago, that his vice president wanted to make sure in this eulogy to point out his early efforts of bringing attention to climate change.

BRINKLEY: Jimmy Carter and climate change, we can go on for — for days on CBS News, because he was deeply concerned about our planet’s diminishing resources and the way we’re — we’re not doing proper stewardship. Remember, Carter got in trouble with the so-called — the crisis of confidence speech, because he was holding Americans basically that we are six percent of the world’s population using up 35 percent of the world’s natural resources and Carter believed that the sun was eternal and hence why he put the solar panels on the White House and was trying to get us into an alternative energy mode, because he knew so clearly the scientific evidence was there on the damage of fossil fuels.

O’DONNELL: And then Reagan removed those solar panels. And now half a century later, this was a debate even in the short presidential election where the President-Elect is promising to drill, baby, drill, famously and where also the other big story that we’re watching at this hour too is what’s happening in L.A. County.

BRINKLEY: And not just with L.A. County, but all of our lakes and rivers and the lands that Jimmy Carter became a watchdog for. He — one of the first things he did in political life wa create the Georgia Conservancy to conserve Georgia coast lands around Jekyll Island, to conserve Okefenokee Swamps, to stop a dam at the Kattachoee [sic] — Chattahoochee River in Georgia and this extended throughout his life. And that’s why he became such great friends with Ted Turner, who I don’t think’s here. Ted turner is 86 and not well, but they were as inseparable as can be.

To see the relevant transcripts from January 9, click here (for CBS) and here (for CNN).