After the interview, Baier said that he had predicted Harris would be a ’tough' person to interview.
Vice President Kamala Harris’s interview with Fox News’ Bret Baier on Wednesday evening was watched by 7.1 million viewers
according to the network. Following the interview, which was contentious at times, David Plouffe, a senior adviser to the Harris campaign, accused the network of ambushing the candidate.
Harris “handled an ambush Fox interview light years better than” how former President Donald Trump handled a recent town hall event hosted by Fox News’ Harris Faulkner that featured questions asked by women voters, Plouffe
wrote on X.
The Harris campaign’s X account, meanwhile, on Thursday
accused Fox News of selectively editing out the “clip of Trump they played during their Harris interview,” omitting a portion where he made comments about “the enemy within.”
Trump
made those comments over the past weekend when asked by Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo about whether he believes illegal immigrants will cause problems on Election Day. Trump said he does not believe illegal immigrants will interfere, but suggested that “radical left” people may cause problems. He was later asked about it by Fox News’ Harris Faulkner on Wednesday in a town hall event, a clip of which was shown in the interview with Harris.
But Harris said during the interview, “Bret, I’m sorry, and with all due respect, that clip was not what he has been saying about ‘the enemy within,’ that he has repeated when he is speaking about the American people. That’s not what you just showed.”
For a period of time, Harris and Baier then spoke over one another. Baier also remarked that the Trump clip was appropriately used.
A day later, Baier told Faulkner on Fox News’ “Special Report” that he aired the wrong clip during his Harris interview and had meant to air the Trump’s comment in the Bartiromo interview.
“I wanna say that I did make a mistake,” Baier
told Faulkner. “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.’”
Responding to how he interviewed Harris, Baier said on Wednesday that he had predicted Harris would be a “tough” person to interview after asking her a question on immigration earlier in his segment.
“I could tell when we started talking that she was going to be tough to redirect without me trying to interrupt,” said Baier before he made a comparison to former President Barack Obama, who he interviewed years ago. “I did this with President Obama—at one point I just said, ‘Mr. President, I know you like to filibuster.’”
“I just didn’t even have the chance, sometimes, to redirect in those ways. I had a lot of other questions.”
Later, Baier
told Fox News’ Mark Levin that with Harris, “I was hoping that it was really going to be this civil back-and-forth. It was good for her to come on, and I think she should do more of them. But I was just trying to get through the talking points and it took a while. And it was a little bit of ... interrupting and kind of getting in on the breath.”
Trump
wrote on X that he believed Baier did a “great job” in the “tough but very fair” Harris interview. He did not comment on Harris’s claims about his remarks shown in the Fox News clip.
During their interview, Baier asked Harris questions about her administration’s stance on immigration, how she would differ from President Joe Biden if she becomes president, and other issues.
Data provided by Nielsen Media Research on Thursday show that more than 7 million people viewed Harris’s interview with Baier, including 882,000 in the 25–54 age demographic that advertisers often target.
The Epoch Times has contacted Fox News and the Harris campaign for comment Thursday.
