Dan Bongino on Monday criticized Fox News, his employer, for posting an edited version of his interview with former President Donald Trump to YouTube over the weekend.
Over the past couple of days, the vociferously pro-Trump pundit has faced the MAGA wrath after a Trump spokesperson pointed out that the ex-president saying the 2020 election was “fake” during his Saturday night Fox News chat with Bongino had been cut when the segment was published on YouTube.
“It’s a disgrace what’s happening, and I don’t think the country’s gonna stand for much longer. They are disgusted. You have a fake election, you have an election with voter abuse and voter fraud like nobody’s ever seen before, and based on that, and based on what happened, they are destroying our country, whether it’s at the border, whether it’s on crime, and plenty of instances, including military,” Trump raged on Saturday to a sympathetic Bongino.
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While Trump’s remarks aired unedited on Fox News and the network’s website, the conservative channel did remove that section from the clip posted on its official YouTube account. In a pointed swipe at Bongino, who has repeatedly railed against “cancel culture” and social-media “censorship,” Trump spokeswoman Liz Harrington sniped that Bongino’s Fox show, titled Unfiltered, was, in fact, “filtered.”
After facing unrelenting criticism from Trump supporters, Bongino addressed the situation Monday on his radio show.
“I feel betrayed by a lot of people,” he declared. “I’ve been called everything this weekend. Sellout, traitor. ‘Pay-triot,’ with a p-a-y, which is unbelievable.”
The right-wing talker went on to note that the decision to remove Trump’s “fake” election remarks was because of Fox’s desire to comply with YouTube’s rules.
“We have no intention of doing that on my show,” Bongino stated. “I don’t control the Fox News YouTube account. However, I do work with them and it’s my show.”
Without specifically calling out his employer by name, the host added: “It’s not acceptable at all. I want to make that clear. This is not acceptable. Meaning, I won’t accept it. And I promise you a definitive resolution that I’m working on now. What it is, we’ll have to find out.”
Bongino continued: “But I promise you a definitive resolution. If you think I’m just going to forget about it and pretend, oh it’ll blow over—you clearly haven’t listened to my show through the year. Not acceptable. Not acceptable to me, and it shouldn’t be acceptable to you.”
In recent months, and specifically since the Jan. 6 insurrection incited by Trump’s lies that the 2020 election was “stolen” from him, YouTube and social-media platforms have cracked down on accounts peddling election disinformation. Trump himself has been banned or suspended from YouTube, Twitter and Facebook, among other platforms.
On top of that, Fox News currently faces billion-dollar lawsuits from voting software companies Smartmatic and Dominion Voting Systems for pushing false claims that the firms’ voting machines rigged the election. The network has filed motions to dismiss both lawsuits.
