Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson has teased an interview with Larry Sinclair, a man whose 2008 allegations of having sex and smoking crack with Barack Obama were shrugged off by US media outlets as the then-senator cruised toward victory in that year’s presidential election.
Carlson posted a social media promo showing snippets from the interview on Tuesday, indicating that the full conversation will be released on Wednesday evening. The one-minute clip on X (formerly Twitter) garnered about 4 million views within just one hour of being posted.
Sinclair said he was introduced to Obama outside a Chicago bar in November 1999 and had no idea that he was an Illinois state senator. He said he twice had sexual relations with Obama, and the two men used cocaine together. He claimed that Obama purchased cocaine on his behalf, and he watched the future president smoke crack in his limousine.
Sinclair detailed his allegations during a briefing at the National Press Club in 2008 and in a book published in 2009. He claimed in the book that Obama also had a gay affair with the choir director at his church and that the man was murdered in December 2007, while the then-senator was running for president.
Asked why the Washington press corps showed no interest in telling his story, even as US voters were assessing Obama and the other 2008 presidential candidates, Sinclair told Carlson, “It would be a story if the media really cared about telling people the truth.” Carlson claimed in an interview last week that the media didn’t run with the story because the Obama campaign threatened to refuse them access to the candidate. “The amount of lying in the media about it was unbelievable,” he said. “This happens all the time up and down government.”
Carlson noted that Sinclair signed an affidavit and took a lie detector test to give more credence to his accusations. However, his credibility was undermined by the fact that he served prison time in the 1980s for financial crimes, including forging checks. Sinclair ran unsuccessfully for mayor of Cocoa, Florida, in 2018.
There has been a spate of reports in recent weeks regarding Obama’s sexuality. His half-brother in Kenya, Malik Obama, posted a Twitter message in July claiming that the former president is “definitely gay.” The post, which was reported by several media outlets, came in response to a letter in which Barack Obama denounced the banning of controversial books in public libraries, including graphic material illustrating gay sexual acts.
Last month, multiple media outlets reported on a recently resurfaced letter that Obama, then a 20-year-old college student, wrote to an ex-girlfriend. “In regard to homosexuality, I must say that I believe this is an attempt to remove oneself from the present, a refusal perhaps to perpetuate the endless farce of earthly life,” he said in the 1982 letter. “You see, I make love to men daily, but in the imagination.”
Obama married his wife, Michelle, in 1992. The couple has two daughters, who were born in 1998 and 2001, respectively.