Fox News host Martha MacCallum tore into author Michael Wolff for claiming she shared questions ahead of her on-air interview with then-Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh last year.
On her evening program Friday, MacCallum reacted to an interview with Wolff in which he referred to fact-checking as “negotiated truth.”
“Well that is just great. Michael Wolff you may not care to know the facts, but I do. So here they are,” MacCallum said. “I wrote my questions on a legal pad, the old fashioned way, on my way to D.C. In a car. No one from the White House or for that matter from fox weighed in on my interview at all, period. This is a news show. We deal in facts. I have been doing this for 25 years and I have never given anyone my questions prior to an interview. That is the story. That is not negotiated truth.”
Kavanaugh sat down with his wife for the interview with MacCallum in September. He was challenged to answer questions about multiple allegations of sexual misconduct that he faced and denied that rattled his confirmation process. Kavanaugh would later be confirmed to the Supreme Court in a close Senate vote that fell mainly along party lines.
Wolff’s last book Fire and Fury was riddled with unsubstantiated allegations, several of which were denounced as false. He is now on a book tour to promote his new work titled “Siege: Trump Under Fire.”
Last week the New York Times published a conversation with Wolff in which he was asked if he asked Fox News for comment on the section in his book in which he wrote the network provided questions ahead of an interview with Kavanaugh.
Wolff said he did not. “It’s a difference between an institutional reporter and a non-institutional reporter. I don’t have to ask the silly questions,” he said. Pressed on whether it was silly if it is stated as a matter in his book, Wolff said, “Yes, because can you imagine a circumstance under the sun in which Fox would come clean on that?”
Fox News responded to Wolff’s claim by calling it “pure fiction.”
The most explosive claim in Wolff’s book is that special counsel Robert Mueller’s prosecutors drafted a three-count obstruction of justice indictment against President Trump. Although The Guardian, which obtained an advance copy of the book, said it had seen the documents, Mueller’s office flatly denied this was true. “The documents that you’ve described do not exist,” Mueller spokesman Peter Carr said in a statement to the Washington Examiner.
