Long after the rest of the media passed on exposing the corruption in D.C., Fox knew when there was a real story.In December 2009, I sat down with Neil Cavuto.It was one of my earliest national interviews.
As a freshman who had been in Congress less than a year, I was sleeping on a $45 cot in my closet in Longworth at the time.Cavuto didn’t book me because I had a famous name.
He booked me because a member who refused to load pork into an omnibus was news.Fox was willing to bring on a back-bencher from Utah because the story mattered.As a junior member of the House Oversight Committee, I did not know then that this would become the only place some of our hearings got traction after the initial press release died down.
Viewers who wanted the whole story knew they could find it on Fox.JASON CHAFFETZ: A DECADE OF SECRET SERVICE FAILURE PROVES THE AGENCY IS STILL IN CRISISStart with Fast & Furious.The Obama Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives deliberately let guns walk into the hands of criminals so the agency could "build a bigger case." On December 14, 2010, Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry was shot and killed in Arizona.
Two of those walked guns were found at the scene.The Justice Department’s first instinct was to minimize it.Other newsrooms were happy to call it a botched sting and move on.
Fox kept Agent Terry’s name on the air.We kept asking who authorized a program that ended with an American lawman dead and thousands of firearms unaccounted for.I was not yet chairman.
I was a member, but I had been down on that border.Without a network willing to stay on the story, Fast & Furious becomes a footnote and Brian Terry becomes a statistic.Then the Secret Service.
By 2015, I was chairman, and the agency charged with protecting the president had become an agency in crisis: a fence jumper with a knife inside the White House, a prostitution scandal in Cartagena, supervisors crashing a crime scene after a night of drinking.We looked in...