Fox News anchor Martha MacCallum wondered if the New York Times tipped off the Biden campaign before it released the massive report on President Trump’s financial status.
The host of The Story said that the quickness of the Biden campaign’s response with ads and merchandise “raises some questions” about whether it knew the report was dropping beforehand during her appearance Tuesday on Outnumbered.
“They did come out with some really glossy ads within hours of this story hitting, which I think raises some questions of its own as to whether or not they had knowledge about this story coming out, that show firefighters and teachers and the amount of taxes that they pay,” she said during a conversation about the report.
The New York Times outright rejected the claim.
“Her speculation is completely false,” a spokesperson for the outlet told the Washington Examiner. “The article was independently reported and there was no contact with the Biden campaign at any point, either before or after it published.”
MacCallum was not the first person on the network to allege collusion between the former vice president’s campaign and the New York Times.
A day earlier, Mollie Hemingway, a senior editor at the Federalist and a network contributor, said that the New York Times’s story, which reported that the president only paid $750 in taxes to the federal government in 2016, the year he was elected, and again during his first year in office, was not “a particularly effective hit, even if it was quickly coordinated with the Biden campaign.”
Hogan Gidley, a spokesperson for Trump’s reelection campaign, similarly speculated that the two were in cahoots during an interview on the network on Monday afternoon.
“It’s interesting to note that the Biden campaign did already have, as soon as the story broke, little lapel buttons for all their supporters to be sold online talking about the story and the president’s taxes,” he said. “The coordination seems to be in lockstep so far.”
