Former Fox News editor to testify before Jan. 6 panel

A former top editor at Fox News said on Friday that he has been called to testify next week before the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. 

Chris Stirewalt, who was ousted from the network following the 2020 presidential election and is now a political editor at NewsNation, said the committee had requested his testimony during its next hearing on Monday. 

“I’m not in a position to tell you now what my testimony will be about, I just want to make sure that folks know that I am so that I’m not playing any hidden ball tricks,” Stirewalt said during Friday’s edition of NewsNation’s “Morning in America.” 

Stirewalt was part of the team at Fox News that made the decision to call Arizona for Joe Biden on election night 2020, a move that infuriated former President Trump and his top aides, some of whom reportedly complained directly to Fox leadership about the relatively early race call.

Stirewalt left Fox News shortly thereafter. 

Since his departure from Fox, Stirewalt has publicly criticized media outlets for their coverage of Trump and his unsubstantiated claims of widespread voter fraud.

“What tugs at my mind after seeing a mob of enthusiastic ignoramuses sack the Capitol, though, is whether that sophistication will come quickly enough when outlets have the means to cater to every unhealthy craving of their consumers,” Stirewalt wrote in an op-ed for the Los Angeles Times shortly after leaving Fox. 

During the House select committee’s first hearing on Thursday, Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), the panel’s vice chair, offered a road map for Monday’s hearing, saying it would focus on how Trump and those in his orbit knew there was no validity to his voter fraud claims.

“In our second hearing, you will see that Donald Trump and his advisers knew that he had, in fact, lost the election,” she said.  

“But, despite this, President Trump engaged in a massive effort to spread false and fraudulent information — to convince huge portions of the U.S. population that fraud had stolen the election from him. This was not true.”

The committee has already aired video testimony to demonstrate that point, relying twice on Thursday on testimony from former Attorney General William Barr.

In one clip, Barr says there was ”absolutely zero basis for the allegations” and that Trump’s claims were “complete nonsense.”

“I told him that it was crazy stuff and they were wasting their time on that and that it was doing great, great disservice to the country,” Barr said.

Testimony from Ivanka Trump was also briefly shown, with the president’s elder daughter saying she knew her father had lost the election.

“I respect Attorney General Barr, so I accepted what he was saying,” she said of Barr’s assertion there was no widespread election fraud.

The committee also played a clip from senior Trump campaign spokesman Jason Miller recounting how Trump had been told by his data team “in pretty blunt terms that he was going to lose.” 

Stirewalt was hired by NewsNation, which is owned by The Hill’s parent company, Nexstar Media Group, last month.