Fox News hosts didn't correct Trump's lie that he won the election in his first interview post-insurrection

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  • In his first interview since the Capitol riot, Donald Trump repeated election disinformation.

  • The Fox News hosts Harris Faulkner and Bill Hemmer didn't correct Trump's false claims on live TV.

  • Trump had called to talk about the conservative talk-radio host Rush Limbaugh, who died Wednesday.

  • Visit the Business section of Insider for more stories.

The Fox News hosts Harris Faulkner and Bill Hemmer did not challenge former President Donald Trump's election disinformation Wednesday in his first interview since the January 6 riot at the US Capitol.

Trump called in to Fox News on Wednesday afternoon, shortly after news broke that the conservative talk-radio host Rush Limbaugh, a staunch Trump ally, died of lung cancer at the age of 70.

Exactly six weeks after his loyalists stormed the Capitol in a deadly insurrection, the former president repeated the lie that the election was stolen from him. Neither TV host interrupted, pushed back, or corrected Trump's false statements.

"Rush thought we won, and so do I, by the way - I think we won substantially," Trump said. "I don't think that could have happened to a Democrat. You would have had riots going all over the place if that happened to a Democrat."

Trump said he was "disappointed with voter tabulation" and added "we were like a third-world country on election night." He argued that "a lot of other people felt that way, too," and said there was widespread anger about his loss.

"Many people are furious - you don't know how angry this country is," Trump said.

All of the Fox News hosts' questions had to do with Trump's relationship with Limbaugh, whose legacy the network covered extensively on Wednesday. The interview came less than a week after the Senate acquitted Trump in his impeachment trial on a charge of inciting the January 6 riot. Seven Republican senators voted to convict Trump, while others, including Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, voted to acquit on technical grounds but still blamed Trump for the insurrection.

When reached for comment, a Fox News spokeswoman pointed Insider to Hemmer's statement on the air that questions unrelated to Limbaugh were "not appropriate" for their Wednesday interview with Trump.

"Mr. President, we probably have a hundred questions for you, but so many of them are not appropriate for this venue, so we'll keep it on this topic for now and we appreciate your time today," Hemmer said.

The Democrat Joe Biden won the US popular vote in the 2020 US election and earned the presidency with 306 electoral votes by flipping battleground states such as Michigan, Wisconsin, and Arizona. Trump refused to concede and waged an unsuccessful legal fight. As his legal losses mounted, he demanded that Georgia's secretary of state "find" the votes he'd need to win and also tried to get his Justice Department to intervene.

Read the original article on Business Insider