Fox News host Bret Baier is attempting to do damage control on his reputation, saying on Thursday that a deceptively edited clip he used during his interview with Vice President Kamala Harris was aired by “mistake.”
During his Wednesday interview with Harris, Baier played a clip of Donald Trump in which the former president was trying to clean up a comment he had made in which he warned that Democrats are the “enemy from within.” Trump’s authoritarian suggestion that Democrats are even more dangerous than foreign adversaries, such as Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, has drawn widespread condemnation.
Baier said Thursday that he was expecting the clip he aired to include the original “enemy from within” comments as well as Trump’s explanation of why he made those comments from the Wednesday town hall hosted by fellow Fox News host Harris Faulkner.
“I did make a mistake,” Baier said on Fox News on Thursday. “When I called for a sound bite, I was expecting a piece of the ‘enemy from within,’ from Maria Bartiromo’s interview, to be tied to the piece from your town hall, Harris, where you asked the former president about the ‘enemy from within.’ It just had the piece from the town hall.”
Baier’s mea culpa came as mainstream media outlets called him out for his adversarial interview with Harris, in which Baier appeared to be trying to bait Harris into a “gotcha” moment by pushing Republican talking points.
His apology is a far cry from the pat on the back he gave himself immediately following the interview, in which he accused Harris of trying to throw him off by showing up about 15 minutes late to the scheduled sit-down.
“I’ll give you a little behind the scenes here, I know you love this. … You know when the kicker in football, they call a timeout right before he is going to kick the field goal. They’re icing the kicker,” Baier said, adding that he thought Harris was trying to throw him off by showing up a little later.
But even former Fox News hosts were not buying Baier’s apology.
“Newsflash: When wrong clips run (which happens) hosts can easily say ‘Sorry that was the wrong clip.’ He or his producers would have known it was the wrong one right then,” former Fox News host Gretchen Carlson wrote in a post on X on Thursday.
Ultimately, despite Baier’s best efforts to bait Harris into making a mistake, Harris did well in the interview. She did not fall for Baier’s traps, including when he attempted to get her to call Trump voters “stupid”—which Harris refused to do.
Harris did so well that even Fox News hosts lamented the fact that she stayed on message.
