Fox & Friends had no choice but to correct Donald Trump just seconds after an interview on the show Thursday morning in which he falsely claimed Kamala Harris met with Vladimir Putin just before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The Republican nominee—who also used his time on the air to complain that all Democrats do “is make up lies about me”—claimed President Joe Biden “sent comrade Kamala to see Putin in Russia three days before the attack.” He described the incident as a “little known fact” which the “press doesn’t want to talk about.”
The elaborate conspiracy theory he outlined came hours before her keynote address to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago and amid surging poll numbers which have put his campaign on defense in swing states.
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Trump said Harris, in the imagined meeting with Putin, “gave her case” but Putin still “attacked three days later” anyway. “He laughed at her,” Trump continued. “He thought she was a joke. Now he’s really laughing when he sees her. Can you imagine her negotiating with President Xi of China, with Kim Jong Un of North Korea? The whole thing is like we’re living in a fantasy land.”
When the interview ended around 20 minutes later, co-host Brian Kilmeade set the record straight.
“Just as a quick clarification, we don’t have confirmation that the vice president went to Russia to meet with Vladimir Putin,” he said. “I know she went over to Europe right before the incursion when Russia invaded Ukraine, and it’s a war that’s still going on right now.”
Kilmeade’s colleague Ainsley Earhardt then chimed in to say that she had repeatedly heard about the meeting, which never happened.
“I’ve heard that said a lot,” she told Kilmeade. “You don’t have confirmation that that’s true?”
“No,” Kilmeade answered. “I don’t think that—I don’t know if the vice president ever met Vladimir Putin.”
Trump made a similar claim on Wednesday during a speech in North Carolina, saying Harris “met with Putin to tell him, ‘Don’t do it,’ and three days later, he attacked.” In that telling, he did not mention that the fictitious meeting took place in Russia.
In truth, Harris traveled to the Munich Security Conference in Germany where she met with U.S. allies in the days before the invasion. The conference, which Putin did not attend, ran from Feb. 18 to Feb. 20, 2022. Russia’s invasion began four days after the event ended, on Feb. 24, 2022.
Kilmeade was also right to be uncertain if Harris and Putin had “ever” met. Last month, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov, who has worked with Putin since 2000, was asked by reporters if he could recall a time when Putin and Harris met. “Frankly speaking, I cannot recall a single contact between President Putin and Mrs. Harris,” Peskov answered, according to Russia’s TASS news agency. The agency noted that there is also no record on the Kremlin website of the pair being in contact.
