Newsmax host Greg Kelly ludicrously held up his phone to argue that the device could look “a little bit” like a gun as he defended immigration agents for fatally shooting 37-year-old Alex Pretti in Minneapolis.
On Monday’s episode of “Greg Kelly Reports,” Kelly displayed an image of Pretti holding a cellphone shortly before he was shot to death on Saturday and suggested that federal agents may have confused it for a gun.
“In a weird way, that phone, I think, can be mistaken for a gun,” he argued. “Now, [Pretti] has a gun, a rather bizarre gun, in his holster. I wanna show you something else.”
Asking his producer to take down the image of Pretti from the screen, Kelly brandished his own cellphone, holding it sideways and pointing it in the air like a gun.
Pretti was never seen holding his phone in such a manner in the footage that has circulated of his killing.
“Does that look like a gun?” Kelly asked. “I think it does a little bit. It’s a phone. It’s black, like most phones. That’s crazy stuff.”
Elsewhere in the episode, Kelly condemned Pretti for “showing up the way he did” at a protest, which he called a “very, very, very stupid thing.”
In a particularly shocking moment, the Newsmax host played a clip of ABC’s Jonathan Karl describing Pretti as an “avid outdoorsman,” “competitive cyclist,” and former Boy Scout — and seized upon those descriptions to compare the slain 37-year-old nurse to a serial killer.
Dennis Lynn Rader, better known by the pseudonym BTK, also “liked to hunt, he was a family man, everybody liked him, his mother liked him – all that stuff,” Kelly began, while a side-by-side image of Pretti and Rader appeared on screen. “Dennis Rader and Alex.”
“I’m sorry, but I can’t just pretend because you’re dead, you’re, like, this superior person,” he continued, later adding: “People are kind of projecting positive qualities on somebody they don’t know.”
Kelly was not the only right-wing pundit to blame Pretti for his own death this week. On Monday, podcaster Megyn Kelly told her listeners: “I know I’m supposed to feel sorry for Alex Pretti, but I don’t. I don’t. Do you know why I wasn’t shot by Border Patrol this weekend? Because I kept my ass inside and out of their operations.”