It was a brutal account that wouldn’t have been out of place on MSNBC or CNN, but it made quite the splash when delivered on Fox News on the evening of Aug. 15.
“The way that it felt in the room was not good,” Fox News senior White House correspondent Jacqui Heinrich told viewers, reporting from the scene shortly after President Donald Trump held a joint news conference in Alaska with Russian President Vladimir Putin to discuss Ukraine that seemed to achieve little.
“It did not seem like things went well, and it seemed like Putin came in and steamrolled, got right into what he wanted to say, and got his photo next to the president and then left.”
Social media lit up. Two days later, on his HBO show, host John Oliver said that Trump “held a press conference that went so badly even this Fox News reporter couldn’t put a positive spin on it.”
But to those who have been following Heinrich’s career at Fox News, it was less surprising.
Despite her employer’s conservative bent, Heinrich, 36, has shown a willingness to challenge Republican politicians and policies, sometimes drawing heat from internal and external critics for doing so - but also winning her plaudits from her fellow White House correspondents.
“She is not afraid of pissing off the base,” said a White House correspondent who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized by their employer to comment. “Her job isn’t to make anyone happy. Her job is to report the news, and that’s what she does.”
In late February, conservative pundits - including some on Fox - cheered after the White House announced that it would formally wrest control of the press pool process away from the White House Correspondents’ Association. Heinrich had a different take. “This move does not give the power back to the people - it gives power to the White House,” she wrote on X.
The following month, Trump criticized Heinrich after she guest-hosted the network’s Sunday morning show, writing on Truth Social, “I watched Jacqui Heinrich from Fox over the weekend and I thought she was absolutely terrible. She should be working for CNN, not Fox.”
During the show, Heinrich questioned Trump’s decision to host a display of Teslas outside the White House. “Was that an appropriate thing for the president to do there. Was it sensitive to the moment that we’re in?” Heinrich asked Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-Ohio). In the same episode, she also pressed Michael Waltz, then serving as Trump’s national security adviser, on whether the president was “being played right now by President Putin.”
Fox News did not respond to Trump’s attack, but veteran network personality Brit Hume came to her defense. “She plays it straight, covering both sides of a story and has certainly played fair with you,” Hume wrote on X, sharing Trump’s post. (Heinrich, who was not made available for an interview, told Vanity Fair in April that Trump’s surprise attack “didn’t keep [her] up at night.”)
During White House press briefings, Heinrich has asked tough questions of press secretary Karoline Leavitt, occasionally eliciting pushback. “That’s not true, actually,” Leavitt said in May after Heinrich asked why Trump announced a trade deal with the United Kingdom “before all the details were finished.”
After working in local television in Boston, Heinrich joined Fox News in 2018 as a general assignment reporter. After covering the 2020 presidential campaign, she moved to D.C. and began covering the Biden administration.
“I thought she was honest and took her job seriously, and she was straightforward with us and gave us a fair opportunity to comment,” said Andrew Bates, who served as senior deputy press secretary in the Biden White House. “There were of course many moments where we disagreed with each other strongly, but it was always a respectful relationship, and I appreciated her sharpness, intellect and her integrity.”
In the days after the 2020 election, Heinrich angered Fox News executives and hosts after she rebutted a Trump tweet that falsely accused Dominion Voting Systems of stealing the election for Joe Biden. On the evening of Nov. 12, 2020, Trump alerted his followers to a “must see @seanhannity takedown of the horrible, inaccurate and anything but secure Dominion Voting System which is used in States where tens of thousands of votes were stolen from us and given to Biden.”
Heinrich reposted Trump’s tweet and wrote: “That’s not what top election infrastructure officials said on the record tonight,” sharing a statement from government officials who concluded that “the November 3rd election was the most secure in American history.”
Internal messages released as part of a defamation lawsuit filed by Dominion against Fox revealed the depth of the backlash against Heinrich, who was seen to have also crossed Hannity by calling out a tweet that praised him.
In a private chat with colleagues, Fox News host Tucker Carlson shared Heinrich’s tweet and urged Hannity to “please get her fired.” Laura Ingraham called her a “vicious liberal.” Hannity flagged Heinrich’s tweet to Fox News chief executive Suzanne Scott and said it was “not gonna fly.”
On the night of her tweet, Scott told two Fox News executives that Heinrich “has serious nerve doing this,” and another executive at Fox suggested Heinrich “be pulled off political coverage” entirely.
Correspondence made public on Aug. 19 as part of a defamation lawsuit against Fox filed by a different voting technology company offered Heinrich’s side of the story. In an exchange with a colleague, Heinrich said Fox viewers simply could not accept Trump’s 2020 loss.
“Its not just emotion,” Heinrich wrote to Fox News reporter Kristin Fisher in early 2021. “Theyre just facts that are unpalatable to our audience.”
But, while several other Fox journalists who faced internal criticism for their coverage of the election, including Fisher and Leland Vittert, have left the network, Heinrich’s standing has only risen. Last year, Fox News promoted her to senior White House correspondent, working alongside Peter Doocy in covering the Biden administration.
“I’ve had nothing but support from this network,” Heinrich said in the interview with Vanity Fair. “I’ve been promoted three times since the last election. I must be doing something right. My key card still works.”
“Jacqui was never a provocateur or antagonist,” Michael LaRosa, who served as spokesperson for first lady Jill Biden, said. “She took the craft of journalism and coverage of our White House seriously. She covered us the exact same way she’s covering this White House.”
In June, Heinrich handily won an election for an at-large seat on the WHCA’s board and will serve as president in 2027.
A White House correspondent who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal WHCA dynamics said her support for the Associated Press and pool process probably played a role in her election. “Jacqui could have kept a low profile. No one would have been surprised, given her employer,” the correspondent said. “But she was immediate and unequivocal. … We all knew that had a cost to her.”
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