Fox News caught with its pants down over Andrew McCabe firing
Donald Trump’s decision to have Jeff Sessions fire Andrew McCabe, just before McCabe was set to retire, is already one of the most controversial and legally risky firings in the history of the federal government. Trump was purposely trying to take McCabe’s pension away, to punish him for the fact that McCabe’s wife is a politically active Democrat. Now it turns out the firing may be even more controversial, because Fox News reported the firing before it was publicly announced.
Fox News published a story on its website on Friday afternoon, announcing that Andrew McCabe had been fired. The story was clearly an unfinished draft, littered with “XXXXX” and “….” in place of the details that were to be filled in later. The draft article was later pulled, but not before a CNN reporter took a screen capture of a portion of it (link). This raises questions about what Fox News knew and when it knew it.
Clearly, the publishing of an unfinished draft version of the story was unintentional. But the question here is whether Fox News simply wrote the draft in advance in case it happened, which sometimes happens in journalism, or whether the Trump administration tipped off Fox News in advance that the firing was coming later in the day. The latter would explain why such a detailed draft was written in advance.
If this were any other network, we’d have merely assumed it was an above-board honest mistake. However, Donald Trump is so closely connected to Fox News, from frequent tweets about Fox and Friends to his widely reported regular private phone conversations with Sean Hannity, there is plenty of reason to ask aloud whether Trump and his people might indeed have given Fox News a heads up about the Andrew McCabe firing before it was announced.
