Fox News host Maria Bartiromo got into an enraged shouting match with then-Attorney General William Barr because he refused to say there had been widespread voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election, according to a new book from Jonathan Karl that will be released on Tuesday.
CNN reports that Bartiromo was livid that Barr wouldn’t join the attempt by some in the Trump administration to delegitimize the results which clearly showed Joe Biden would be the next president:
“Betrayal,” by ABC’s chief Washington correspondent Jon Karl, highlights Bartiromo’s damaging role as a promoter of reckless lies about the election.
In the book, which comes out on Tuesday, Karl writes that “Bartiromo had once been a widely respected and trailblazing financial journalist. As a correspondent for CNBC, she was the first television reporter to report live from the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. 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.”
Barr confirmed to Karl that the conversation with Bartiromo did indeed take place and that he refused to budge when she demanded he cast doubt on the legitimacy of the election:
“She called me up and she was screaming,” Barr told Karl on the record. “I yelled back at her. She’s lost it.”
Karl said he reached out to Bartiromo for a response, 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.”
“Bartiromo did not respond,” Karl wrote, “but a Fox News spokesperson did get back to me and denied Barr’s account of the conversation on Bartiromo’s behalf.”
As we long suspected, Fox News and other right-wing media outlets such as Newsmax and One America News were all part of the larger conspiracy to stage a coup that would allow Trump to remain in power indefinitely. The riots at the Capitol on Jan. 6 were also part of that plot, and are being investigated by the House Select Committee.
Every single person who played any role in the attempt to destroy this republic and our representative democracy should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. That includes Maria Bartiromo, who should also be shown the door by Fox.
