Fox News chief political anchor Bret Baier and Fox Business anchor Maria Bartiromo, who scored invitations for Tuesday night’s lavish White House banquet honoring Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, both passed on criticizing President Donald Trump for his pathetic excuse-making about Crown Prince Mohammed ordering the brutal murder of the U.S.-based dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
Khashoggi was an outspoken critic of the crown prince who wrote columns for The Washington Post criticizing his native Saudi Arabia’s repressive regime from his self-imposed exile in Virginia, London, and Istanbul. In October 2018, he was reportedly lured to the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, killed by Saudi operatives, and dismembered with a bone saw, generating an international scandal stoked further by the CIA’s subsequent determination that Crown Prince Mohammed ordered his assassination. Fox, meanwhile, spent the weeks after Khashoggi’s murder running cover for both Trump and Crown Prince Mohammed.
Trump, who has a fundamentally transactional view of U.S. foreign policy, an affinity for brutal dictators, and a tendency to dehumanize journalists, offered little interest in Khashoggi’s fate at the time. And he became enraged on Tuesday afternoon when ABC News chief White House correspondent Mary Bruce dared to ask the crown prince a question about Khashoggi’s murder during their joint Oval Office appearance.
The president interrupted Bruce, calling her outlet “fake news” and “one of the worst in the business.” He then said of Khashoggi: “You’re mentioning somebody that was extremely controversial — a lot of people didn't like that gentleman that you’re talking about. Whether you like him or didn't like him, things happen, but he [the crown prince] knew nothing about it. And we can leave it at that. You don't have to embarrass our guest by asking a question like that.” Crown Prince Mohammed, for his part, said Khashoggi’s murder was “a huge mistake and we're doing our best that this doesn't happen again.”
When Bruce asked Trump a question later in the press conference about the Jeffrey Epstein files, the president blew up again, criticizing her “attitude” and complaining that she had asked Crown Prince Mohammed, “a man who is highly respected,” “a horrible insubordinate and just a terrible question.” In a depressing commentary on the current state of U.S. press freedom, he then suggested that federal regulators should strip ABC’s broadcasting license “because your news is so fake and it's so wrong.”
Trump’s repeated defenses of a foreign tyrant’s murder of a U.S.-based journalist — and his suggestion from the White House that his administration should destroy an outlet for asking “insubordinate” questions about it — drew immediate attention from news outlets and harsh criticism from many journalists.
But Baier had nothing to say about it when he discussed the press conference with Fox anchor Martha MacCallum on The Story that afternoon. Instead, sounding like a Trump spokesperson, he touted the “massive” scale of impending “deals” between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia, and commented that Trump, “in his defense of all things MBS, realizes that that relationship is crucial to his thought about the way forward in the Middle East.” He added that Crown Prince Mohammed’s response on Khashoggi was the same as what Baier described as the “solid answer” the crown prince had given Baier in a previous interview.