Murdoch told Jared Kushner ‘there is nothing I can do’ on Fox News Arizona call: book

Fox News owner Rupert Murdoch told Jared Kushner, former President Trump’s son-in-law and a top White House adviser, that there was nothing he could do about the network’s decision to call Arizona for President Biden on election night 2020.

In an upcoming memoir, Kushner writes about election night at the White house and says he called Murdoch shortly after Fox’s Decision Desk called Arizona for Biden, a move that shocked and infuriated the Trump campaign.

Murdoch told Kushner he would look into it, Kushner wrote, and then the media mogul called him back.

“Sorry, Jared, there is nothing I can do,” Kushner quoted Murdoch as saying. “The Fox News data authority says the numbers are ironclad — he says it won’t be close.”

The passage from Kushner’s book was obtained and published online by New York Times reporter Kenneth P. Vogel on Wednesday.

Kushner’s call to Murdoch was widely reported after the election, but Kushner’s account is the first insight into what was said between the two powerful political figures.

After Fox made the Arizona race call, Trump’s campaign attacked the network’s Decision Desk head, Arnon Mishkin, describing him as a “[Hillary] Clinton-voting, Biden-donating Democrat.”

A pair of top Fox News politics staffers have since left the cable news giant. One of them, Chris Stirewalt, a former editor at Fox, testified before the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. 

This story was updated at 4:08 p.m.