Maria Bartiromo, among Fox Corp.’s biggest on-air enablers of Donald Trump’s falsehoods about election fraud, used her media clout to vent to then-Attorney General William Barr after Trump’s defeat, according to a new book.
In mid-November 2020, the Fox News and Fox Business host “called Barr to complain that the DOJ hadn’t done anything to stop the Democrats from stealing the election,” journalist Jonathan Karl recounted in “Betrayal: The Final Act of the Trump Show.”
“She called me up and she was screaming,” Barr told Karl in an excerpt shared by CNN on Sunday. “I yelled back at her. She’s lost it.”
Karl, the ABC News chief Washington correspondent, confronted Bartiromo about Barr’s assertion because “after all, it’s highly inappropriate for a journalist to call the attorney general and demand he do something related to a criminal investigation.”
Karl wrote that Bartiromo didn’t respond but a Fox spokesperson “denied Barr’s account of the conversation on Bartiromo’s behalf.” It was Barr who set the aggressive tone, the rep said. HuffPost has reached out to Fox for further comment.
Karl also described Bartiromo in unflattering terms. She was someone who “had once been a widely respected and trailblazing financial journalist. ... Now she had her own show on Fox News and she was using it to boost a series of unfounded allegations designed to overturn a presidential election,” he wrote.
Bartiromo solidified her reputation as a Trump booster when she gave the president his first television interview on Fox News after the election and allowed him to spew baseless claims largely unfettered.