A Fox News Anchor Isn’t Having It With Trump’s Lie-Filled Interview With Maria Bartiromo

It’s Fox News anchor against Fox Business anchor, which is something that no one would have expected to see a year ago (since Shep Smith left town, that is), but President Trump’s fake “election fraud” claims are tearing the cable news set apart. Things were bound to get interesting after Fox and Friends crapped all over Trump’s conspiracy about evil software changing people’s votes, even as Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson are keeping their tin-foil hat-dream alive. And now, Eric Shawn isn’t here for colleague Maria Bartiromo’s lie-filled Trump interview from this past weekend.

This would be the same interview in which Trump complained to Bartiromo about “massive dumps” that cost him the election. That’s bizarre enough, but Bartiromo didn’t challenge any of Trump’s claims, despite judge after judge shutting down the Trump campaign’s “voter fraud” lawsuits and the New York Times securing statements from state officials, who all say there’s no evidence of voter fraud. Trump, however, insisted to Bartiromo that there’s “so much evidence” to support his allegations, and mean judges “won’t allow us” to run with it.

Bartiromo did no fact-checking on Trump’s baseless claims. In response, CNN’s Brian Stelter stated, on air, of the interview, “This was not hardball. It wasn’t even softball. It was t-ball.” Stelter also tweeted this clip of Eric Shawn’s on-air refutation of the debacle.

Here’s what Eric Shawn said:

“He doubled down on his claims of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election, even though local and national election officials, as well as federal and state courts in multiple states, and in some cases the Trump campaign’s own lawyers, have said there is no evidence to prove that. Experts say such claims are unsupported falsehoods that are not backed up by any facts.”

Things are not looking good for Maria Bartiromo here, right? She was cool with Trump declining to provide the evidence that he insists exists, despite experts and state officials insisting that this evidence does not exist. It’ll be interesting to see how Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson handle this one, given that Bartiromo (as Vox’s Aaron Rupar puts it) is “basically a North Korean news anchor now.”