Fox News host Bret Baier recapped his Wednesday night interview with Vice President Kamala Harris, telling his colleagues that he got a sense early on that Harris “was going to be tough to redirect without me trying to interrupt.”
The interview, Harris’ first on the right-wing network since becoming the Democratic nominee, was broadcast on Special Report after being filmed in the previous hour. According to Baier, the interview had been scheduled for 5 p.m., but Harris showed up 15 minutes late. This, he complained, was like “icing the kicker” in football.
“We were supposed to start at 5 p.m. This was the time they gave us. Originally, we were going to do 25 or 30 minutes. They came in and said, ‘Well, maybe 20.’ So, it’s already getting whittled down. And then the vice president showed up at about 5:15 p.m. We were pushing the envelope to be able to turn it around for the top of the 6 p.m.. So that’s how it started,” Baier said.
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The Fox host, who would go on to interrupt Harris’s responses several times, said their first exchange—on immigration—showed that she would be “tough.”
“I could tell when we started talking that she was going to be tough to redirect without me trying to interrupt,” said Baier, who likened his experience to interviewing Barack Obama years ago. “I did this with President Obama—at one point I just said, ‘Mr. President, I know you like to filibuster.’ I just didn’t even have the chance, sometimes, to redirect in those ways. I had a lot of other questions.”
Baier said later that towards the conclusion of the interview, he could see members of Harris’ team signaling that his time was up.
“I’m talking, like, four people waving their hands like it’s got to stop,” he said, adding that Harris might benefit by doing similar interviews in the future.
“Maybe she should do more of these,” he said.
Later, in an interview with conservative personality Mark Levin, Baier expanded, saying, “There was a slight bit of frustration” and that, “I had so much stuff to get to.
“I was hoping it was going to be this civil back-and-forth, but it was good for her to come on and I think she should do more of them, but I was just trying to get through the talking points and it took a while, and it was a little bit of, you know, interrupting, and kind of, getting in on the breath.”
“They wanted a viral moment,” Baier suggested, repeating how his initial time was allegedly trimmed by the Harris campaign and that Harris was late.
“I was really hoping it was going to go the way I envisioned which was more like a conversation about topics. We could say, ‘You have differences, this is where I am,’ I would press but in a respectful way. And I’ve done many of those interviews where it’s really fruitful to have a back-and-forth and you get some place, and you actually learn something about policy and where they are. Then, I thought, it could be the other way. It could be that this is meant for a viral moment and essentially, this is practice for a debate and so I need to be able to get my questions as much as I can in a respectful but tough way and hope that she comes back when she’s in a different, talkative mood and we learn more.”
