Former Donald Trump aide and current Fox employee David Bossie has disappeared from Fox News and three sources familiar with the circumstances say they’ve been informed it was in part an effort by the network’s opinion programming not to infuriate the president.
Bossie had been a Fox News stalwart and a close Trump ally up until Axios reported that his political group, the Presidential Coalition, had raised millions aligning itself with the president but spent a pittance of it on actual political activity.
The item was widely perceived throughout Trumpworld as Bossie personally profiting off his close association to Trump, and tricking donors into thinking they were aiding the Trump reelection effort. And the president himself was so enraged that he directed his campaign to draft and blast out an official statement denouncing Bossie’s activity, as The Daily Beast first reported.
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The brass at Fox News and its sister channel Fox Business, both of which Trump routinely watches, noticed as well, according to the three sources. A source at Fox said that there was widespread chatter internally about the Bossie story after it dropped.
Another one of these sources noted that Fox personnel had also voiced some ethical concerns about what the former Trump aide and his group did. The source stressed that they had no knowledge of the White House or campaign formally requesting Bossie be given a time out but they were told that Trump’s allies at the network simply felt it safest to take a break from Bossie until after Trump cooled off.
And a timeout was given.
According to a Daily Beast review of weeks of footage, Bossie has not appeared on Fox News or Fox Business Network since just before the news of the alleged self-dealing broke. On April 30, he appeared on Trump-boosting Trish Regan’s primetime FBN show but has since vanished.
Prior to that, during the month of April, Bossie appeared at least twice per week on shows across Fox News and Fox Business, including hits on The Ingraham Angle, Fox & Friends, and Lou Dobbs Tonight. Bossie’s opinion columns on FoxNews.com, meanwhile, had been near-weekly features prior to the Axios item. But the last item he wrote for the site ran on May 1. The Axios story published on May 5.
Reached for comment on this story, a Fox News spokeswoman simply replied, “not accurate.” She did not respond to follow-up questions seeking clarification on what she claimed was inaccurate about the reporting.
Bossie wasn’t just a former senior Trump campaign aide. He was also a top outside adviser to the president and even a former dark-horse candidate for White House chief of staff late last year.
Bossie didn’t respond to requests for comment. Fox still publicly lists Bossie as a Fox News contributor. This wouldn’t even be the first time in the Trump era that he had been punished internally at Fox. Last year, he was slapped with a two-week suspension after telling a black Democratic strategist on-air, “You’re out of your cotton-picking mind!”
