Fox News’ Bret Baier shares his impressions of Kamala Harris after a contentious meeting

Fox News host Bret Baier summarized his Wednesday night interview with Vice President Kamala Harris, telling his colleagues that he sensed early on that it would be difficult to redirect Harris without me trying to interrupt him.

The interview, Harris’ first on the right-wing network since running for the Democratic nomination, aired on Special report after filming for the past hour. According to Baier, the interview was scheduled for 5 p.m., but Harris showed up 15 minutes late. This, he complained, was like “freezing the kicker” in football.

“We should start at 5 p.m. That was the time they gave us. Originally we wanted to do 25 or 30 minutes. They came in and said, “Well, maybe 20.” So it’s already being cut. And then the vice president showed up around 5:15 p.m. We did everything we could to turn it around by 6 p.m. at the latest. So that’s how it started,” Baier said.

The Fox host, who interrupted Harris’ answers several times, said their first exchange – about immigration – showed she would be “tough.”

“When we started talking, I knew it was going to be hard to redirect her without me trying to interrupt,” said Baier, who compared his experience to interviewing Barack Obama years ago. “I did that with President Obama – at one point I just said, ‘Mr. “President, I know you like to filibuster.” Sometimes I just didn’t even have the option to redirect that way. I had a lot of other questions.”

Baier later said that toward the end of the interview, he saw members of Harris’ team signaling that his time was up.

“I’m talking about four people waving their hands like this has to stop,” he said, adding that Harris could benefit from conducting similar interviews in the future.

“Maybe she should do more of that,” he said.

Later, in an interview with conservative personality Mark Levin, Baier added, “There was a little frustration” and that “I had so much to accomplish.”

“I was hoping it would be a polite back and forth, but it was good for her to come and I think she should do more of it, but I was just trying to get the talking points through and that took time for a while, and it was a little bit, you know, a pause and kind of an inhalation.”

“They wanted a viral moment,” Baier suggested, reiterating that his original time was supposedly cut short by the Harris campaign and that Harris arrived late.

“I was really hoping it would go the way I thought it would, which was more like a conversation about topics. We could say, “You have differences, here I am,” I would urge in a respectful way. And I’ve done a lot of these interviews where it’s been really fruitful to have a back and forth and you’ll get a seat and you’ll actually learn about the policy and where it stands. Then I thought it could be the other way around. It could be that this is intended for a viral moment and is essentially an exercise in debate and therefore I need to be able to ask my questions in a respectful but tough way as much as possible and hope “That she comes back when she does it in a different, talkative mood and we learn more.”