- Fox News anchor Bret Baier "was ready to give into" pressure from Trump after the network said he lost Arizona, new book says.
- Baier argued for rescinding the news organization's Arizona call, according to the book.
Fox News anchor Bret Baier "was ready to give into" Trump White House pressure in 2020 after the news organization decided on election night to call Arizona for Joe Biden ahead of other networks, according to the new book "The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021."
Baier, the lead Fox evening news anchor, wanted to rescind the Arizona call, wrote New York Times chief White House correspondent Peter Baker and New Yorker staff writer and CNN global affairs analyst Susan Glasser.
"'The Trump campaign was really pissed,' he wrote in an email to Jay Wallace, the president and executive editor at Fox," according to the book set for publication on Tuesday. "'This situation is getting uncomfortable. Really uncomfortable. I keep having to defend this on air.'"
The authors wrote that journalists on the Decision Desk thought there was "no serious question about Arizona," but Baier, in his email, accused them of "'holding on for pride,'" the book says.
"'It's hurting us,'" he wrote, according to the book. "'The sooner we pull it — even if it gives us major egg — and we put it back in his column the better we are in my opinion.'"
The authors called the statement "stunning," given that Arizona was never in the Trump column, even if his margin of defeat in the state narrowed just after the election. "The leading news anchor for Fox was pushing not just to say Arizona was too close to call but to pretend that the president had won it," they wrote.
Asked to comment, a Fox News spokesperson said in a statement to Insider: "FOX News made an election night call of historic magnitude and was first to do so. We stood by the call in the days that followed, it was proven correct, and other news organizations eventually joined us."
Biden won Arizona by less than a percentage point. Trump publicly attacked the network and cast Arizona among the states at the center of his election denial conspiracies.
Jay Wallace didn't do what Baier wanted, but he later refused to let the Decision Desk team call Nevada for Biden after other networks did because he "did not want Fox to be the first to call the election and declare Biden president-elect," the authors wrote.
Afterward, two members of the Decision Desk team were fired, according to the authors, and the announcements were delayed by two months because the "executives did not want the embarrassment of publicly owning their decision to push out journalists for making the right call." One employee's departure was called a "retirement" and another's was called part of a "restructuring," according to the authors.
A Fox News spokesperson confirmed the layoff was part of a post-election restructuring and did not comment on the retirement. The spokesperson noted that Arnon Mishkin, the head of the Decision Desk who was in charge at the time of the Arizona call, is returning for the November elections as Decision Desk head.