Poor Picked On Bret Baier

'That was the mask coming down': Kamala Harris said to have exposed Fox News in real-time

Fox News host Bret Baier recapped his Wednesday night interview with Vice President Kamala Harris, telling his colleagues that he got a sense early on that Harris “was going to be tough to redirect without me trying to interrupt.”

The interview, Harris’ first on the right-wing network since becoming the Democratic nominee, was broadcast on Special Report after being filmed in the previous hour. According to Baier, the interview had been scheduled for 5 p.m., but Harris showed up 15 minutes late. This, he complained, was like “icing the kicker” in football.

“We were supposed to start at 5 p.m. This was the time they gave us. Originally, we were going to do 25 or 30 minutes. They came in and said, ‘Well, maybe 20.’ So, it’s already getting whittled down. And then the vice president showed up at about 5:15 p.m. We were pushing the envelope to be able to turn it around for the top of the 6 p.m.. So that’s how it started,” Baier said.

The Fox host, who would go on to interrupt Harris’s responses several times, said their first exchange—on immigration—showed that she would be “tough.”

“I could tell when we started talking that she was going to be tough to redirect without me trying to interrupt,” said Baier, who likened his experience to interviewing Barack Obama years ago. “I did this with President Obama—at one point I just said, ‘Mr. President, I know you like to filibuster.’ I just didn’t even have the chance, sometimes, to redirect in those ways. I had a lot of other questions.”

Later, in an interview with conservative personality Mark Levin, Baier expanded, saying, “There was a slight bit of frustration” and that, “I had so much stuff to get to.

“I was hoping it was going to be this civil back-and-forth, but it was good for her to come on and I think she should do more of them, but I was just trying to get through the talking points and it took a while, and it was a little bit of, you know, interrupting, and kind of, getting in on the breath.”

“I was really hoping it was going to go the way I envisioned which was more like a conversation about topics. We could say, ‘You have differences, this is where I am,’ I would press but in a respectful way. And I’ve done many of those interviews where it’s really fruitful to have a back-and-forth and you get some place, and you actually learn something about policy and where they are. Then, I thought, it could be the other way. It could be that this is meant for a viral moment and essentially, this is practice for a debate and so I need to be able to get my questions as much as I can in a respectful but tough way and hope that she comes back when she’s in a different, talkative mood and we learn more.”

“They wanted a viral moment,” Baier suggested.

According to MSNBC's Mika Brzezinski, Vice President Kamala Harris did serious damage to the already shaky reputation of Fox News when she busted Fox personality Bret Baier for running a deceptive clip of Donald Trump.

In a highly scrutinized segment, Trump's "enemy within" attack on his critics came up, and the Fox interviewer shared a clip of the former president blowing it off and turning himself into a victim of persecution that led Harris to rebuke him with "That's not what you just showed."

She then added, "Here’s the bottom line, he has repeated it many times, and you and I both know that. And you and I both know that he has talked about turning the American military against the American people. He has talked about going after people who are engaged in peaceful protest.”

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Using that exchange as a jumping-off point, Brzezinski pointed out, "In the Fox News town hall with hand-picked women, an extremely, extremely generously supportive audience and host, he actually said much more and named Nancy Pelosi."

"He doubled down on the comments," she elaborated. "Yet Fox News shows a clip that is completely unrelated to the very point that was being made about the danger of this former president threatening his political adversaries."

"I think Kamala Harris did something that actually no one has been able to do," she added, "which is call them out in real-time. I urge people to look at that clip and to pass it around because that was the mask coming down."