The Trump administration declined invitations from Fox News Sunday to discuss President Donald Trump’s recent termination of former FBI Director James Comey.
Chris Wallace, the host of Fox News Channel’s flagship Sunday program, provided background on the aforementioned declinations:
“We want to begin by telling you who you’re not going to hear from, today – the White House. Since the president fired James Comey on Tuesday, we’ve been asking for a guest to explain the president’s reasoning and discuss the fallout. Saturday morning, White House officials said they would not put anyone out to discuss that. But they did offer senior officials the discuss the president’s foreign trip, this week. When we said we were going to focus on Comey for at least the half hour of this program, they put those officials on other shows.”
Earlier on Sunday morning, Wallace described news media focus on FBI’s investigation of alleged Russian political influence during 2016’s presidential election season as justified:
“We’re talking about the potential that a foreign power interfered in our election. I’d say more than the potential, all the intelligence agencies say it happened. The question is to whether anybody from the Trump world was involved. It’s a separate question. There’s been no evidence that we’ve heard of that.
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I do take exception to the idea that this is hysteria … This is a big story. The fact that we’re talking about it a week later. This is the first time in history that a president has fired an FBI director who was conducting an investigation that was directly investigating him and his associates.
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It’s a big story and I think it’s a legitimate story to cover.”
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