Fox’s Chris Wallace Privately Derided a Jake Tapper Interview as ‘Fake News’ in Email to Trump Aides

Veteran Fox News anchor Chris Wallace dinged CNN anchor Jake Tapper in a 2017 email to Trump officials, according to a new report, deriding his questioning in an interview with Trump Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin as “fake news.”

The email — obtained by the Hollywood Reporter via a FOIA request — features Wallace asking a Treasury spokesman about Tapper’s interview after seeing a transcript of it.

“Is this right?” Wallace asked then-Treasury spox Tony Sayegh. “Was the first question Tapper asked the secretary about the special counsel?”

“That is correct,” Sayegh replied.

“As much as I hate the expression ‘fake news’ — this is a perfect example of it — especially on the week the country gets a massive overhaul of the tax code,” Wallace said.

Former Trump aide Hope Hicks and another White House aide are copied on the email, per the Hollywood Reporter.

Wallace objected to Tapper asking Mnuchin if Special Counsel Robert Mueller might be fired by Trump during a December 2017 interview — while the Trump administration was on the verge of passing a massive tax overhaul.

Wallace interviewed Mnuchin on the same morning, and grilled the treasury secretary about the tax legislation.

Trump was publicly assailing Mueller in December 2017 and on the morning of Tapper’s interview, Trump’s lawyers were alleging Mueller was acting unlawfully in his investigation.

The Mueller report states that Trump attempted to have White House Counsel Don McGahn fire Mueller in June 2017, something that was first reported by the New York Times in January 2018.

The Hollywood Reporter obtained a number of Treasury Department emails via a Freedom of Information Act request filed by the group Democracy Forward.

In a statement, a CNN spokesperson said, “Turns out Chris Wallace is no different than many of his peers at Fox News. It’s disappointing that he’d need to take cheap shots at another journalist to curry favor with this administration.”

A Fox News spokesperson told Mediaite that Wallace is “proud of the tough and probing interview he did with Treasury Secretary Mnuchin in which he asked at least 10 questions about the tax bill that had just been passed, including whether wealthy Americans need all of those tax breaks and if the GOP tax plan will create a more complicated tax system.”