Fox News master Bret Baier summarized his interview on Wednesday night with the vice president Kamala Harristelling his colleagues that from the start he felt Harris “would be hard to redirect unless I tried to interrupt him.”
The interview, Harris' first on a right-wing network since becoming the Democratic nominee, aired on the network. Special report after being filmed over the previous hour. The interview was scheduled for 5 p.m., but Harris showed up 15 minutes late, Bayer said. He complained that it was like the kicker's icing in football.
“We were supposed to start at 5 p.m. This was the time they gave us. We were originally going to do 25 or 30 minutes. They came and said: “Well, maybe 20.” So it is already being reduced to nothing. And then the vice president showed up at about 5:15 p.m. We pushed the envelope so that we could open it by the beginning of 18:00. That’s how it all started,” Bayer said.
The Fox host, who interrupted Harris' answers several times, said their first conversation – about immigration – showed she would be “tough.”
“When we started talking, I could tell it would be hard to redirect her unless I tried to interrupt,” said Bayer, who compared the experience to an interview with Barack Obama years ago. “I did the same thing with President Obama – at one point I just said, 'Mr. President, I know you like to filibuster.' Sometimes I didn't even have the option to redirect this way. I had many other questions.”
Bayer later said that near the end of the interview, he saw members of Harris' team signal that his time was up.
“I'm talking about four people waving their arms like this has to stop,” he said, adding that Harris could benefit from conducting similar interviews in the future.
“Maybe she should do more events like this,” he said.
Later in an interview with a conservative personality Mark LevinBayer continued by saying, “There was a little disappointment” and that “I had so much to do.
“I was hoping it would be this kind of polite chat, but it was good for her to come out and I think she should do more of those, but I was just trying to get through talking points and it took a while and it was a little bit, you know, interrupting and kind of holding your breath.”
“They wanted a viral moment,” Baier suggested, reiterating that his original time was supposedly cut due to Harris' campaign and that Harris was late.
“I was really hoping that it would go the way I imagined it would go, which was more like talking about topics. We could say, 'You have differences, that's where I'm at,' I insisted, but in a respectful way. And I did a lot of those interviews where it's really helpful to talk to each other, and you get some space, and you really learn something about politics and where they are. Then, I thought, everything could be different. Perhaps this is intended for a viral virus. moment and it's essentially debate practice, and so I need to be able to ask as many questions as possible, respectfully but firmly, and hope that she comes back when she's in a different, talkative mood and we learn more.”
