CNN anchor Kaitlan Collins devoted part of Thursday night’s “The Source” to laying out the chilly manner in which Fox News severed ties with host Maria Bartiromo, telling her audience that sources at CNN had verified the longtime anchor lost her job over private company information that made its way to President Donald Trump’s White House.
By Collins’ account, Fox gave no advance notice and offered no meaningful public explanation, and after 12 and a half years at the network Bartiromo’s exit was acknowledged with nothing more than a short note of thanks — no goodbye program, no on-air send-off. Pointing to CNN’s sources, Collins said Bartiromo was let go “because she disclosed confidential information to the Trump White House.”
Inside the Alleged Memo Leak
What Collins described lines up with reporting that had already emerged: Bartiromo lost her job after supplying the White House with an internal company message. She reportedly passed it along in order to account for Fox’s decision not to carry Trump’s primetime address in July 2026, a speech built on unproven allegations that China meddled in the 2020 election.
Across the company, Fox News had instructed staff to avoid the conspiracy-filled speech in its coverage. Status’s Oliver Darcy reported that Bartiromo had, as he characterized it, essentially turned on her own employer, and that by handing the memo to Trump’s aides she allegedly violated her employment contract.
Echoes of Tucker Carlson’s Ouster
Brian Stelter, CNN’s chief media analyst, told Collins that the suddenness of the departure called to mind Fox News’ 2023 dismissal of former host Tucker Carlson, a move that followed a string of scandals surrounding the primetime anchor. “That was another shocking Fox departure, and the story that came out on day one was not the full story,” Stelter said.
In Carlson’s case, Stelter said, several forces were at work out of public view: executives had grown weary of a larger-than-life star and were perhaps uneasy about some of his off-air conduct.
A Costly History With Election Claims
Fox’s wariness about amplifying Trump’s false election fraud claims has an expensive backstory. In 2023, the network settled a defamation lawsuit brought by Dominion Voting Systems for more than $787 million, a case built on the network’s repeated airing of bogus assertions — Bartiromo’s broadcasts among them — that Dominion machines had been rigged to hand the 2020 election to former President Joe Biden. A separate defamation case filed by Smartmatic against Fox and Bartiromo remains in litigation.
Bartiromo was one of the network’s biggest promoters of Trump’s 2020 election fraud claims, and Stelter suggested she was eager to cover the president’s July speech and its allegations about results from six years ago. Her firing, he said, signals that Fox is no longer willing to tolerate that brand of conspiratorial content on its airwaves.
Stelter framed the lawsuits as both hugely expensive and a lasting headache for the company, and said that history may be shaping how Fox approaches the 2026 midterms amid concern about how Trump might attempt to interfere in them. The network remains pro-Trump in plenty of ways, he added, but it may be drawing a line — one aimed not only at the past but at what comes next.
Trump’s Favorite Host, Shown the Door
The dismissal is all the more striking given Bartiromo’s standing in Trump’s orbit. She is widely regarded as one of the president’s favorite hosts at Fox News, and Trump tapped her as one of the board members at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. It is not clear whether Trump personally asked Bartiromo why the network was staying away from his address.
There were also signs of trouble inside the building before the ax fell. Bartiromo’s own staffers were reportedly instructed not to speak with her in the weeks leading up to her firing, an unusual freeze-out for an anchor of her tenure and profile.
Fox has offered little publicly. A network spokesperson told Status that the dismissal was a business decision and that the release put out by the company spoke for itself. Beyond the statement thanking Bartiromo for her years of service, the network has not addressed the leak allegations, leaving the fullest account of her exit to the reporting Collins laid out on Thursday and to the Smartmatic case still working its way through the courts.