FCC chairman Brendan Carr has threatened to take action against ABC after Jimmy Kimmel suggested in a monologue that Charlie Kirk‘s assassin is “one of them,” meaning one of “the MAGA gang.”

Appearing on Benny Johnson’s podcast on Wednesday, Carr suggested that the FCC has “remedies we can look at.”

“We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” Carr said. “These companies can find ways to change conduct and take action, frankly, on Kimmel or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.”

A few hours after Carr’s remarks, ABC announced that “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” will be pre-empted indefinitely, shortly after Nexstar, which operates 32 ABC affiliates, said it would not broadcast the show for the “foreseeable future.”

In his monologue Monday night on the ABC late-night show, Kimmel said that the “MAGA gang” was trying to score political points off Kirk’s murder. Kirk, a prominent conservative activist, was shot and killed Sept. 10 at a debate at Utah Valley University. Three days later, authorities announced they had arrested the suspected shooter.

“We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them,” Kimmel said.

The comment has been picked up and lambasted in conservative media, which has pointed to official statements that the suspect, Tyler Robinson, holds “leftist ideology.” Greg Gutfeld said on Fox News’ “The Five” that Kimmel is suffering from “delusions” and predicted that he would be “done” if he doesn’t address his remark.

On Wednesday, Carr was asked on Johnson’s podcast for the FCC’s stance on Kimmel’s comment.

“It appears to be some of the sickest conduct possible,” Carr said. “In some quarters, there’s a very concerted effort to try to lie to the American people about the nature of one of the most significant, newsworthy, public interest acts that we’ve seen in a long time.”

Carr suggested that Disney, ABC’s parent company, should address Kimmel’s conduct before the FCC gets involved. “You could certainly see a path forward for suspension over this,” Carr said.

Carr suggested that the FCC could pursue news distortion allegations against local licensees.

“Frankly I think it’s past time that a lot of these licensed broadcasters themselves push back on Comcast and Disney, and say ’We are going to preempt — we are not going to run Kimmel anymore until you straighten this out,’” he said. “It’s time for them to step up and say this garbage — to the extent that that’s what comes down the pipe in the future — isn’t something that serves the needs of our local communities.”

The Center for American Rights, a conservative group, filed an FCC complaint on Wednesday against KABC-7, the network’s West Coast flagship. The complaint argued that Kimmel’s comments had been contradicted by official statements, and that Kimmel had failed to correct himself.

“This is not a simple or innocent mistake,” the complaint stated. “It is a massive error made regarding the most important news event of the month, if not the year… That sort of reckless indifference or willful defiance of facts is incompatible with ABC’s public interest obligations.”

The Center for American Rights filed a complaint last year against a CBS station over a “60 Minutes” interview with Kamala Harris, which led the agency to seek public comment on whether the news magazine had distorted Harris’ response to a question about the war in Gaza. As it sought FCC approval for its merger with Paramount, Skydance Media pledged to install an ombudsman to watch over CBS news content.

The FCC chairman also suggested Wednesday that the agency could use its power to go after news “hoaxes,” citing mainstream media coverage of Hunter Biden’s laptop, Joe Biden’s mental acuity, and the Jussie Smollett case.

Last week, Kimmel called for an end to “angry finger-pointing” in the wake of Kirk’s death. “Can we just for one day agree that it is horrible and monstrous to shoot another human?” he wrote on Instagram.

Anna Gomez, the lone Democratic FCC commissioner, reacted to Carr’s remarks on X, suggesting that he was exploiting Kirk’s death “as justification for broader censorship and control.”

“This Administration is increasingly using the weight of government power to suppress lawful expression,” she wrote. “And it is doing so not because speech glorifies violence or breaks the law, but because it challenges those in power or reflects views they oppose. We must stand firm against every attempt to silence dissent, punish satirists and government critics, and erode individual liberty.”

The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression said in a statement Wednesday that the FCC has “no authority to control what a late night TV host can say.”

“[T]he First Amendment protects Americans’ right to speculate on current events even if those speculations later turn out to be incorrect,” said Ari Cohn, lead counsel for tech policy at FIRE. “Subjecting broadcasters to regulatory liability when anyone on their network gets something wrong would turn the FCC into an arbiter of truth and cast an intolerable chill over the airwaves.”

In July, Carr was asked about Trump’s war of words with ABC’s “The View,” after co-host Joy Behar said the president was “jealous of Obama.” Appearing on Fox News, Carr was asked if the show was in the administration’s “crosshairs.”

“It’s entirely possible that there’s issues over there,” Carr said. “Once President Trump has exposed these media gatekeepers and smashed this facade, there’s a lot of consequences. I think the consequences of that aren’t quite finished.”