Fox’s News’s Bret Baier admitted that he made a crucial mistake during his sit-down with Kamala Harris that led to one of her strongest moments in the interview .
At one point during their exchange Wednesday night, Harris referred to Donald Trump’s remarks on Fox News’s Sunday Morning Futures, calling some Americans the “enemy from within” and threatening to send the military after them.
“We asked that question to the former president today,” Baier replied, calling for a recent clip. “Harris Faulkner had a town hall, and this is how he responded.”
“They were saying I was like, threatening,” Trump said in the snippet. “I’m not threatening anybody. They’re the ones doing the threatening. They do phony investigations, I’ve been investigated more than Alphonse Capone. He was the greatest—no, it’s true. But think of it. It’s called weaponization of government. It’s a terrible thing.”
The snippet Baier played conveniently edited out the beginning of Trump’s comments, where he was asked to respond to Harris’s claim that he was “unhinged.” In response, Trump explicitly called Democrats the “enemy from within.”
“You know what they are, they’re a party of sound bites. Somebody asked me, ‘Can they be brought together?’ You know it’s very—I never thought, really I wasn’t thinking like they could. Because they are, they are–very different. And it is the enemy from within. They’re very dangerous. They’re Marxists, they’re Communists, they’re fascists, and they’re sick,” the former president said , calling them “so sick” and “so evil.”
During their interview, Harris had nailed Baier for the blatant misdirect. “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’s speaking about the American people,” Harris said. “That’s not what you just showed!”
When Baier tried to argue with Harris, she tore into him. “You didn’t show that. And here’s the bottom line. He has repeated it many times. And you and I both know that. And you and I both know that he has talked about turning the American military on the American people. He has talked about going after people who are engaged in peaceful protests. He has talked about locking people up because they disagree with him. This is a democracy!”
On Thursday, Baier claimed that the whole thing was a crazy misunderstanding, according to Mediaite.
“Harold, I did make a mistake,” Baier told panelists Faulkner and Harold Ford Jr. on Fox News’s Special Report . “And I did want to say that I did make a mistake. 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 about the town hall.”
He then played the two clips back to back—again conveniently editing out the beginning of his town hall response where Trump doubled down on his statement.
Many Republicans have struggled to explain away Trump’s incendiary comments, while others denied that they happened at all . But they did.
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