Baier broke what might have been the biggest story in the history of Fox’s “news” division — if it had been true.

Five days before Election Day 2016, the Fox anchor reported a string of anonymously sourced claims about FBI probes of Hillary Clinton’s email server and foundation and concluded that the investigations “will continue to likely an indictment.” Baier’s bombshell generated hours of coverage on his network as Fox’s pro-Trump partisans cheered its potential to swing the election.

You may have noticed that Clinton was not, in fact, indicted.

In fact, reporters at other outlets quickly assessed and debunked Baier’s story. The Fox anchor, who had sourced his report to two unnamed “sources with intimate knowledge of the FBI investigations,” turned out to have seemingly been serving as the witting or unwitting mouthpiece for an anti-Clinton faction within the bureau. Baier ended up apologizing and all but retracting the story. 

At another network, Baier’s debacle might have resulted in some sort of repercussions. But there’s rarely a penalty at Fox for being wrong if your falsehoods help Republicans.

While Baier would like to move past Fox’s history of lying to bolster Trump’s 2020 subversion campaign, the Fox anchor is personally implicated in shocking breeches of journalistic standards with obvious ramifications for the coming election.

After Fox’s decision desk called Arizona for Joe Biden on election night — infuriating the Trump campaign and many Fox viewers — Baier urged network executives to overrule the decision desk in order to make amends.

Baier emailed Fox President Jay Wallace on November 5, 2020, to say that the decision desk’s Arizona call was “hurting us” and should be rescinded. He texted Tucker Carlson, who worried that the network could lose its audience to right-wing rivals, the same day, writing, “I have pressed them to slow. And I think they will slow walk Nevada.”

Fox did not retract its Arizona call, which was subsequently vindicated. But Wallace reportedly “overruled the Decision Desk team” soon after, “refusing to let them call Nevada for Biden even after other networks did.”

The Fox anchor continued working behind the scenes to prevent the decision desk from making accurate calls that might displease viewers. 

“I know the statistics and the numbers, but there has to be, like, this other layer,” Baier argued at a November 16, 2020, Zoom meeting with Fox’s top executives as well as decision desk leaders, adding that the network should “think beyond, about the implications” of election calls.

Fox doubled and tripled down on Trumpian election fraud lies over the following weeks, eventually resulting in a massive defamation payout to Dominion Voting Systems. Filings in the lawsuit revealed that Baier knew that there was “NO evidence of fraud” in the election — and that his colleagues sharply criticized him privately for suggesting otherwise.

“More than 20 minutes into our flagship evening news broadcast and we’re still focused solely on supposed election fraud,” longtime Fox executive Bill Sammon wrote to politics editor Chris Stirewalt during Baier’s hour on December 2, 2020. “It’s remarkable how weak ratings make good journalists do bad things.”

“It’s a real mess,” Stirewalt replied. “But sadly no surprise based on the man I saw revealed on election night.”

But Baier got the last laugh — he’s still at Fox interviewing presidential candidates, while Sammon and Stirewalt were fired to appease the network’s Trumpist viewers.

Fox’s PR team used to regularly highlight Baier alongside longtime network stalwarts Shep Smith and Chris Wallace to claim that the network had a credible news division. It is telling that Baier is the only member of that troika still employed by the network following what his former colleagues describe as its yearslong transformation into a Trumpist propaganda outlet.

After Smith abruptly resigned in 2019, he said “that his presence on Fox became untenable as opinion shows on the network spread falsehoods that hosts knew were lies.” 

After Wallace left in 2021, he said it had become “unsustainable” to work at a network where people questioned who won the 2020 election and whether pro-Trump rioters storming the U.S. Capitol constituted an insurrection.

They aren’t alone. 

Stirewalt said after his 2021 firing that during the Trump years, Fox became “an arm of a political party.” In March 2018, Fox strategic analyst Ralph Peters told colleagues that he would not renew his contract because Fox had become “a mere propaganda machine for a destructive and ethically ruinous administration.” 

After longtime political correspondent Carl Cameron left in 2017, he explained that “over the years, the right-wing hosts drowned out straight journalism with partisan misinformation” and said the network’s stars were “allied” with Trump.

But for Baier, working for a Trumpist propaganda network that lies to its viewers isn’t untenable or unsustainable — it is simply lucrative. While Wallace and Smith left, Baier signed a new contract and traded up to a $37 million Palm Beach estate.