Fox News chairman Lachlan Murdoch and Fox News Media CEO Suzanne Scott were pressed by Democratic Rep. Robert Garcia in a letter Thursday accusing their network of “deceptively” editing a 2024 interview with President Donald Trump to distance the president from disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein’s “horrific crimes.”
Garcia, who was recently voted the ranking member of the House Oversight Committee, asked whether Fox News’ editing of the Trump interview “misled the American people.” He also asked whether Trump or any members of his campaign team “may have interfered” with the channel’s editing process.
Fox News, in a statement to TheWrap, said there was “no selective or deceptive editing whatsoever.”
During a televised interview on “Fox & Friends Weekend” in June 2024, Trump was asked by Rachel Campos-Duffy if he would “declassify the Epstein files” once elected president.
“Yeah, yeah, I would,” Trump said in that airing.
In a longer answer that aired the next day on “Fox & Friends” and other platforms, the president’s full response was given: “Yeah, yeah, I would. I guess I would. I think that less so because, you don’t know, you don’t want to affect people’s lives if it’s phony stuff in there, because it’s a lot of phony stuff with that whole world. But I think I would, or at least—”
At that point, Campos-Duffy jumped in an asked “Do you think that would restore trust? Help restore trust?”
Trump continued: “I don’t know about Epstein, so much as I do the others. Certainly, about the way he died. It’d be interesting to find out what happened there, because that was a weird situation, and the cameras didn’t happen to be working, etc., etc. But yeah, I’d go a long way toward that one.”
Garcia, in his letter obtained by TheWrap, said the president’s “well documented past social ties” with Epstein and Fox News’ “selective omission raises serious concerns that the network may have deliberately sough to shield then-candidate Trump from any further association with Epstein or the horrific crimes he perpetrated.”
He added: “It is legitimate to ask whether President Trump himself or those close to him may have actively encouraged this withholding of information from the American people.”
A spokesperson for Fox News reiterated to TheWrap that “there was no selective or deceptive editing whatsoever. Portions of the initial interview that aired on ‘Fox & Friends Weekend’ with then-candidate Trump on June 2, 2024 had standard editorial cuts for time and the full answer to the Epstein question aired on the following day’s show.”
The rep continued: “The entire unedited interview was also run on multiple Fox News Media platforms with full transparency on June 3, 2024, including audio, digital and streaming, while the entire transcript was posted on foxnews.com.”
The full interview is available here; Trump’s answer comes around the 35:30 mark.
Garcia’s letter to Murdoch and Scott came after Paramount recently paid Trump $16 million to settle a lawsuit claiming “60 Minutes” had “deceptively edited” an interview with Kamala Harris leading up to the 2024 election.
The Democratic lawmaker from Los Angeles added his questioning of Murdoch and Scott is especially important, considering “President Trump’s efforts to punish Paramount.”
CNN was the first outlet to report the letter on Thursday.
