Former Fox News political editor Chris Stirewalt said he will testify at the House select committee’s next hearing about the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol.
Stirewalt, who was fired from Fox last year, made the announcement on the NewsNation cable network, where he is currently the political editor.
“I have been called to testify before this committee, and I will do so on Monday,” he said on air Friday.
He told anchor Adrienne Bankert that he was “not in a position now to tell you what my testimony will be about,” but said that he wanted to make a full disclosure.
The committee has already indicated that it would examine how former President Trump’s false election claims were spread in the media.
Stirewalt’s announcement comes the day after the committee’s first public hearing on the Jan. 6, 2021 riot, when hundreds of pro-Trump supporters broke through the doors and windows of the Capitol to disrupt Congress’s confirmation of Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election.
The next hearing is slated for 10 a.m. Monday with five more hearings planned after that. Fox News did not broadcast the committee’s first primetime hearing, Fox News Channel stuck with its usual lineup of opinion hosts during the hearing itself, including Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity.
Stirewalt was fired from Fox News in January 2021, in what the network called a restructuring at the time. But Stirewalt later wrote in the Los Angeles Times that he was canned by the network after defending Fox News’ decision to call the important swing-state of Arizona for Joe Biden on Election Night. The call marked the first major signal that Trump would lose his bid for re-election.
In turn, Trump’s camp demanded the network retract what it claimed was a premature call. When the network refused, it triggered backlash by the candidate and his supporters.
In his LA Times op-ed, Stirewalt, without calling out Fox News, said media “hype men” helped push the false narrative that the election was stolen from Trump.
“The rebellion on the populist right against the results of the 2020 election was partly a cynical, knowing effort by political operators and their hype men in the media to steal an election or at least get rich trying,” he wrote. “But it was also the tragic consequence of the informational malnourishment so badly afflicting the nation.”
Last year, Rupert Murdoch, who controls Fox News’ parent company, told The Washington Post that Stirewalt’s firing “had nothing to do with the correct Arizona call by the Fox decision desk.”
[Written in collaboration with other media outlets with information from the following sources]
