There was excitement on social media, morning TV and even Fox News after the station aired Bret Baier’s interview with former President Donald Trump on Monday.
During the sit-in — Trump’s first since he was indicted by federal law earlier this month — the Fox News host urged Trump to explain details from the grand jury’s 37 counts stemming from his handling of sensitive documents after he left White house.
Trump responded with rambling responses to certain prosecution allegations that Fox News analyst Brit Hume later called near “incoherent.”
At some point Baier confronted Trump with it a recording from July 2021 from a meeting where the former president admitted to possessing a classified document on a possible attack on Iran and apparently contradicted his defense that he had declassified everything he took.
Trump’s response was difficult to decipher, but he initially said he couldn’t declassify it “because I wasn’t president at the time,” echoing what he said in the recording. He then said that “there was no document at all.”
“Well it is,” Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-California) tweeted, sharing a clip of that exchange. “Trump just admitted to Fox News that he stole and passed on classified material.”
Other critics, commentators, and legal experts also weighed in, estimating that Trump’s lawyers were probably not too happy with the performance.
“It appears that Deputy Special Counsel Bret Baier filleted the defendant today,” said conservative attorney George Conway joked.
MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” hosts Mika Brzezinski said the interview “didn’t go well for the former president,” describing it as “incoherent and potentially distressing.”
“Trump jumped back and forth between the defense lines there,” Brzezinski said. “Sometimes it said the documents had been released, sometimes it said there were no documents at all.”
The “Morning Joe” hosts, among others, praised Baier for his handling of the interview.