Thursday afternoon, PJ Media reported that Maria Bartiromo was no longer employed at Fox News after more than 12 years on the air. The network's statement gave no hint as to why she and Fox parted ways.
"Effective today, Maria Bartiromo is no longer with Fox News Media," the statement read. "We thank Maria for her work over the last 12 1/2 years and wish her all the best on her next chapter."
Vague corporate language like that usually means somebody's hiding something. And now subsequent reporting reveals not only that Fox did indeed fire Bartiromo, but also the reason why.
According to a report from the media newsletter Status, Fox dismissed the longtime anchor after learning she had secretly told the White House that network bosses ordered staff not to cover President Donald Trump's July speech on election interference in the 2020 election.
Dylan Byers of Puck News reports the same thing, citing multiple sources.
NEW: The Maria Bartiromo backstory, per multiple sources familiar....
Maria Bartiromo wanted to pursue a story related to China and 2020 election voting conspiracies... a major sensitivity for the network given its Dominion and Smartmatic lawsuits.
A Fox Business executive sent…
— Dylan Byers (@DylanByers) September 3, 2026
He also reveals that Bartiromo was fired on August 9 and has since retained Bryan Freedman as her lawyer.
In the speech, Trump laid out a case that China had compromised voting machines, bribed American journalists, and run a fake ballot scheme designed to inflate Joe Biden's vote total in 2020. Trump also said the intelligence community had evidence the meddling was coming, then evidence that it happened, and buried both.
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Apparently, Fox News had other plans for how much of that story would get coverage. The network privately issued written guidance telling senior employees to steer coverage away from Trump's claims, and most of the staff fell in line.
Bartiromo didn't fall in line.
According to the story, when Trump or a White House aide asked her why Fox wasn't covering the story, she admitted her bosses had blocked it, then forwarded them the internal text message proving it. According to Status, handing over that confidential communication violated the terms of her employment agreement with Fox.
I’m sure we’ll hear more on this in the coming days.
Democrats have spent years treating any Republican who questions the 2020 election as an enemy of democracy, despite the documented irregularities in the battleground states that year. They gave themselves a pass for disputing Bush's 2000 win and Trump’s 2016 win. But 2020’s results could not be questioned, and anyone who did paid a price. The only acceptable narrative surrounding 2020 was that it was the safest and most secure election in history, and anyone who questioned that was undermining our democracy.
Ironically, even Joe Biden has acknowledged foreign interference in the 2020 election. But the only election interference he would admit to was the kind in which it was implied that it was done to help Trump.
“The Biden administration targeted Russia with sweeping sanctions and diplomatic expulsions Thursday, punishing Moscow for its interference in the 2020 US election, its SolarWinds cyberattack and its ongoing occupation and ‘severe human rights abuses’ in Crimea,” CNN reported at the time.
The idea that Putin wanted to help Trump never made sense. Still, Biden continued to promote it, gave no real evidence, and did not mention China. Now, China wanting to help Biden? That made sense, yet the media refuses to entertain the idea that the 2020 election was anything but secure.
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