Thursday Delivered Another Non-Scandal – a Look Into the Fox News Trump Interview Editing Accusations

This has proven to be a week glutted with media-centric stories, and the hysteria has been rather imbalanced. There was the highly-touted Wall Street Journal Epstein “exposé” that became nothing more than Donald Trump purportedly sending a bawdy birthday card – and that is filled with doubts. Stephen Colbert was canceled, and empty claims that Trump was behind it were made. There was also CBS News hysteric Scott MacFarlane claiming he received PTSD after the Trump assassination attempt, all because MAGA audience members looked at him.

CBS Reporter Claims He Got ‘PTSD’ After Trump Assassination Attempt – The Reason Is Mind-Boggling

One other claim of a scandal percolating involved a Fox News interview with Donald Trump from last year. It was said the network had deceptively edited his response to a Jeffrey Epstein question. It was jumped on as being on par with the Kamala Harris interview with “60 Minutes” that led to a lawsuit and settlement with the president, and many in media circles are trying to build this into a comparable scandal.

WOW. Fox News edited Trump’s Epstein answer in an interview last year.

Makes you wonder if Kamala Harris should sue like Trump did when CBS edited her interview.pic.twitter.com/StoYFncvgS
— Republicans against Trump (@RpsAgainstTrump) July 15, 2025

As this began brewing, Rep. Robert Garcia (D-CA) on the House Oversight Committee is demanding answers from the network. He has made the call for Fox News to turn over internal communications regarding this interview and the decisions behind the edit. It is not exactly clear what oversight he carries on this matter. What is clear is how many feel like this is a slam dunk on Fox. They think this mirrors the “60 Minutes” controversy: an edited interview involving a candidate ahead of the election to aid their campaign.

If this is, in fact, a sign of the network reworking Trump’s answer to make him appear better for the election, there would be three questions to ask regarding the segment:

Was the interview deceptively edited?
Was Trump’s answer significantly altered?
Did Fox hide the full response?

This stems from a sit-down Trump conducted last summer with Pete Hegseth, Will Cain, and Rachel Campos-Duffy. The passage that has everyone worked up regards a question from Campos-Duffy about the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files. It was the final query in the original airing, where Campos-Duffy had asked about declassifying various documents, including specifically the Epstein files, and Trump responded in the affirmative. “Yeah, I would,” he says at the end of the segment.

It turns out he had given a longer answer, where he alluded to some possible issues with releasing all of the content, suggesting there might need to be some discretion when doing so. As Campos-Duffy gave a neutral response to his comment, Trump expanded on his answer.

“I guess I would. I think that less so because, you don’t know, because you don’t want to affect people’s lives if it’s phony stuff in there, because it’s a lot of phony stuff with that whole world. But I think I would.

He was then asked about the prospect of the release restoring trust, and Trump gave another response.

Yeah. I don’t know about Epstein so much as I do the others. Certainly about the way he died. It’d be interesting to find out what happened there, because that was a weird situation and the cameras didn’t happen to be working etc., etc. But yeah, I’d go a long way toward that one.

Are these two exclusively different responses, on par with what was seen with the CBS News Kamala debacle? That is hardly the case. What Trump appears to have done is hedge a bit on his insistence, citing some sensitivities that might be involved. But unlike Harris, he remained on point. And at the end of the expanded answer, he basically asserts he would still go on with the release, so it is not realistic to say that something was changed significantly with the editing, and deception is not readily evident.

So, the final question is: Did Fox keep this edit hidden from public view? Hardly. What cuts the fuse of this “explosive” news is pointing out a simple reality – it rests in how Trump’s full answer is known today and pointed at as problematic. That expanded response was not just recently leaked and discovered. Fox made the entire 75-minute interview available at the time to be seen, and it remains available on their site today. That full interview was posted on June 3 – of 2024 – so any claim that the news network was somehow hiding this expanded answer does not stand up at all.

This is an insistence on a controversy, when it is dispelled by one simple question: Why was this not considered controversial for over a year? This differs significantly from CBS News, which came under fire immediately when the edit was exposed during the “60 Minutes” broadcast. In the days following, there was a call for the network to release the transcript and/or the unedited Kamala interview, and the producers and network executives resisted doing so. The only way those full examples came to light was after the FCC investigation began and the agency released them once they were turned over.

For those claiming today that Fox committed some act of subterfuge with this interview, they are resting on desperation. Why is it a "scandal" today when for the past year there has not been mention of it? They want there to be a controversy, but when it comes to actual evidence of wrongdoing or deception, they are left wanting.

Editor's Note: The mainstream media continues to deflect, gaslight, spin, and lie about President Trump, his administration, and conservatives.

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