Maria Bartiromo barreled through warnings to boost 'wackadoodle' lies: book

A new book claims that Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo single-handedly gave birth to the "Big Lie" that Donald Trump used to justify his efforts to overturn his election loss and which cost Fox Corp. nearly $800 million.

Fox boss Rupert Murdoch decided to send the vanquished president a message – you lost, get over it – within an hour of Fox News projecting on Nov. 7, 2020, that Joe Biden had won the election by directing an editorial to be published in the New York Post giving point-by-point directions on managing the defeat, according to excerpts of Brian Stelter's new book Network of Liespublished by Politico.

"Get Rudy Giuliani off TV," the editorial advised. "Ask for the recounts you are entitled to, wish Biden well, and look to the future.”

Fox News Media CEO Suzanne Scott told Lachlan Murdoch she would circulate that editorial around the network, and the hosts of "Fox & Friends Weekend" were told Nov. 8 to stay away from election fraud claims, but Bartiromo took to the airways immediately afterward with an episode devoted to baseless conspiracy theories about Dominion Voting Systems – which came from a highly questionable source.

"This episode is worth analyzing in detail because Bartiromo’s source was so unhinged; because the segment foreshadowed months of smears; and because it provided a predicate for the 'Big Lie' that Trump continues to promote to this day," Stelter wrote. "Six in 10 Republican voters say they believe the 2020 election was 'stolen' from Trump. But 'stolen' how? One day after Biden became president-elect, Bartiromo used her Fox megaphone to tell a story that Trump and the heartbroken MAGA base embraced, to the detriment of Trump’s party and the country writ large."

David Clark, the Fox executive who oversaw weekend programming, warned Bartiromo the day before not to book Rudy Giuliani due to his "bizarre" conspiracy theories about the network allegedly aiding Biden, but the host ignored him and asked her producer Abby Grossberg to warn the former New York City mayor not to bash Fox News on air.

“It’s also a pretape,” Grossberg told Bartiromo, “so if it goes completely off the rails, we could always try to cut."

But the episode's other guest, attorney Sidney Powell, proved to be even more problematic.

"What they didn’t know was that Powell’s Dominion smear was rooted in a ludicrous email from one random, especially unglued Trump fan," Stelter wrote.

Dominion's legal team reviewed hundreds of thousands of emails during their ultimately successful defamation suit – which cost Fox News $787.5 million – and found those costly claims were based on a single email dated Nov. 7, 2020, from an unhinged Trump fan named Marlene Bourne, who sent a message called "Election Fraud Info" to Powell, Fox host Lou Dobbs and pro-Trump activist Tom Fitton, and then forwarded by Powell to Bartiromo.

"Parts of the three-page email were, by Bourne’s own admission, 'wackadoodle,'" Stelter wrote. "She claimed to be 'internally decapitated'; she described having visions; she said, 'The Wind tells me I’m a ghost.' She said some things that were easily debunked: For example, that Roger Ailes and other 'owners of the major US media outlets secretly huddle most days to determine how best to portray Mr. Trump as badly as possible.' It was a supremely well-kept secret, indeed, since Ailes died in 2017 — and he hadn’t owned Fox, he’d just acted like he did in his CEO role. The email also asserted that former Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia 'was purposefully killed at the annual Bohemian Grove camp … during a weeklong human hunting expedition.'"

Instead of deleting the missive and ignoring it, Bartiromo instead sent it to Grossberg and then replied to Powell, indicating she had spoken to Eric Trump, the ex-president's son, and described Bourne's email as "very imp info."

"Bourne’s 'wackadoodle' email was germane for two reasons: It was chock-full of equally loony claims about Dominion, and it was the only message referencing Dominion in Bartiromo’s and Grossberg’s inboxes prior to Powell’s live shot on their show," Stelter wrote. "In other words, it was Patient Zero in the coming contagion that would infect all of Fox and the GOP."