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Long after the rest of the media passed on exposing the corruption in D.C., Fox knew when there was a real story.
In December 2009, I sat down with Neil Cavuto. It was one of my earliest national interviews. As a freshman who had been in Congress less than a year, I was sleeping on a $45 cot in my closet in Longworth at the time. Cavuto didn’t book me because I had a famous name. He booked me because a member who refused to load pork into an omnibus was news. Fox was willing to bring on a back-bencher from Utah because the story mattered.
As a junior member of the House Oversight Committee, I did not know then that this would become the only place some of our hearings got traction after the initial press release died down. Viewers who wanted the whole story knew they could find it on Fox.
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Start with Fast & Furious. The Obama Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives deliberately let guns walk into the hands of criminals so the agency could “build a bigger case.” On December 14, 2010, Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry was shot and killed in Arizona. Two of those walked guns were found at the scene.
The Justice Department’s first instinct was to minimize it. Other newsrooms were happy to call it a botched sting and move on. Fox kept Agent Terry’s name on the air.
We kept asking who authorized a program that ended with an American lawman dead and thousands of firearms unaccounted for. I was not yet chairman. I was a member, but I had been down on that border. Without a network willing to stay on the story, Fast & Furious becomes a footnote and Brian Terry becomes a statistic.
Then the Secret Service. By 2015, I was chairman, and the agency charged with protecting the president had become an agency in crisis: a fence jumper with a knife inside the White House, a prostitution scandal in Cartagena, supervisors crashing a crime scene after a night of drinking.
We looked into all of it. We held the hearings. Called out the problems. The agency’s response was not to fix the protection mission. It was to open my old job application and pass around “information he might find embarrassing.” Forty-five employees accessed my file. A senior official wrote that the information needed to “get out. Just to be fair.”
This was not a personnel spat. It was a federal agency using private information to punish the committee investigating it. Other outlets covered the fence jumper for a news cycle. Fox stayed on the pattern — and on the retaliation — long enough for an inspector general to put it in writing.
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Let’s not forget the IRS. Lois Lerner’s shop slow-walked conservative groups before an election. When Congress asked for the emails, we were told they were gone — hard drive crash, backup tapes that “didn’t exist.” It took an inspector general two weeks to find tapes the agency swore were unrecoverable.
The White House called the scandal phony. The Justice Department declined to prosecute Lerner’s contempt. A lot of newsrooms took the cue. Fox did not. As chairman I told the country the commissioner had failed to comply with a subpoena, failed to tell the truth about what had been destroyed, and failed to notify Congress until after the evidence was gone.
You can argue with the politics of that fight. You cannot argue with missing emails and a tax agency picking targets by ideology. That story stays buried if the only cameras left in the room have already declared it over.
I’ve been honored to know and interact with so many great Fox personalities over the last two decades. I got to know Charles Krauthammer in the Fox green room, and on the air when he talked about investigations we were running. We did not always agree. I was in awe of his strength. His was a voice I actually listened to, day after day.
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One day I said, “Charles, how are you? You’re my favorite person on the planet.”
He said, “Good to see you, Jason. You’re my favorite person on the Oversight Committee.”
I said, “My universe is bigger than your universe.”
He said, “Yeah, well, I’m being generous.”
Fox News Channel went on the air October 7, 1996. Thirty years later the scandals have different names. The instinct to look away does not. A chairman can issue a subpoena. He cannot make the country watch. For a lot of the years I spent on that committee, Fox was the network that still would.
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Keep putting the hearing on. We will bring the documents.