US president was cropped out of image in which he was posing with wealthy sex offender who died last August. Photo taken at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in 2000 was used in Fox News segment about Maxwell’s recent arrest by FBI on sex trafficking charges
Fox News said on Monday the network had “mistakenly” edited President Donald Trump out of a photo of himself and Melania Trump (then Melania Knauss) posing with Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell.
The photo, taken by Getty at Mar-a-Lago in Florida on Feb. 12, 2000, was used on Fox News during a segment Sunday about Maxwell’s recent arrest by the FBI in New Hampshire last week in connection to her involvement in Epstein’s sex trafficking.
However, the image used on Fox News cropped President Trump out of the photo.
Epstein, who died by suicide last August while awaiting trial, was already a registered sex offender when the photo was taken.
“On Sunday, July 5, a report on Ghislaine Maxwell during Fox News Channel’s America’s News HQ mistakenly eliminated President Donald Trump from a photo alongside then Melania Knauss, Jeffrey Epstein and Maxwell,” a Fox News spokesperson said.
“We regret the error.”
Earlier on Sunday, former national security adviser John Bolton reminded an interviewer that the president spends a lot of time watching cable news.
“I think that if you could clock the amount of time he spends actually in the Oval Office versus the amount of time he spends in the little dining room off the Oval Office with the cable news networks in one form or another on, it would be a very interesting statistic,” Bolton told Face The Nation on CBS on Sunday.
Trump has recently criticised Fox News for reporting on “suppression polls” that show him trailing Joe Biden in the presidential race.
He has also frequently mentioned how much more he likes OANN, a newer conservative channel.