Greta Van Susteren — the host of the 6 PM ET Newsmax show The Record with Greta Van Susteren — has long been a prominent figure in cable news, with a career that spans multiple networks and decades.
A former criminal defense and civil trial attorney, Van Susteren first entered the national media spotlight during the O.J. Simpson trial, offering legal analysis for CNN. Her sharp insight and on-air presence led to a co-hosting role on Burden of Proof, and eventually her own show.
In 2002, Van Susteren made a high-profile move to Fox News, where she anchored On the Record for 14 years.
In 2022, Van Susteren joined Newsmax after a brief stop at MSNBC, taking on the 6 PM ET hour.
I sat down to watch one of her more recent episodes to get a feel for what the program looked like. Does it try to follow the Special Report with Bret Baier formula that competitor Fox News features, where the onus is placed on newsgathering and storytelling more than conservative punditry which is more prominent on the program? Or is Van Susteren more closely aligned with the likes of Rob Finnerty, Greg Kelly, Rob Schmitt, and Chris Plante in the Newsmax lineup?
I want to focus on a segment that saw Van Susteren speaking with Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard. As you may have heard, Gabbard released files last week purporting to show that the Obama administration had worked in an adversarial manner against the Trump campaign in 2016, by attempting to show that Russia was working with the campaign.
Critics have argued that the release of the files is hogwash, a ruse — if you will — to take attention away from the administration’s reluctance to release files relating to Jeffrey Epstein. Others have argued the files prove a conspiracy that should lead to the arrest and prosecution of Barack Obama.
So, Greta Van Susteren tried to get to the bottom of it. The first question she asked of Gabbard was the logical starting point: “When did you begin looking at these documents?”
What a prosecutorial approach by the Newsmax host. You can tell — right off the bat — that she wants to take a linear approach to this interview and story.
The one downside of the question was that Van Susteren allowed Gabbard to go on for entirely too long. There’s not an easy way to interrupt a rambling guest, no matter the medium. And, to her credit, the Newsmax host did interject enough that Gabbard realized that it was time to toss the proverbial football back to the host for the next question. But Gabbard spoke uninterrupted for nearly four minutes. And in a roughly eight minute segment, you just can’t have that.
Van Susteren then shared that she viewed two items in part of the release of the files that stuck with her that she thought were “cooked up.” The first was the now-famous “Hunter Biden’s laptop story is Russian disinformation” letter signed by 51 intelligence officers.
Now, the problem with that nugget is that — it doesn’t have anything to do with Barack Obama and whether or not he led some sort of deep state coup against the Trump campaign. That letter was signed in 2020, nearly four years after Obama departed the White House.
So, it isn’t exactly germane to the conversation at hand. If Van Susteren thought that that smelled like something worth investigating, that’s fine. Have at it, and welcome Gabbard back to the program another time. But this was supposed to be an interview about how the Obama administration allegedly worked a “treasonous conspiracy” to undermine Trump ahead of and in the immediate aftermath of his election in 2016.
The other thing that Van Susteren thought raised red flags were the actions of former FBI Director James Comey, and his release of notes from a meeting with Donald Trump to The New York Times. Again, that isn’t necessarily on-topic for this interview, though, in my opinion.
To say that Gabbard never really made her case for why the actions led to a “treasonous conspiracy” led by Barack Obama is a bit of an understatement. Do the files bear that out? They absolutely could. But that didn’t come across, in the slightest, in the interview with Van Susteren.
And to her credit, Greta Van Susteren was fair by stating that many of the files were heavily redacted, making it difficult for her to come to any conclusions about the topic. At the conclusion of the conversation, the Newsmax host noted that she looks forward to some day looking through the unredacated files so she can come to her own conclusion.
So, what’s the biggest takeaway from The Record with Greta Van Susteren? Well, it wasn’t exactly what I had expected. There are many who call themselves “journalists” today. For instance, when Candace Owens was sued by French President Emmanuel Macron last week, she questioned why the leader of a country would ever sue a “foreign journalist.” Listen, if Candace Owens is a journalist, then I’m a supermodel.
But I’ve always viewed Greta Van Susteren as a legitimate journalist. Not a partisan hack masquerading as a journalist, but one who was largely unbiased and was hell-bent on seeking the truth. There was a little of both in this interview. She started off on the right foot in the conversation with Gabbard, but asking when the files first came to light. Now, a cynic could say she was setting up Gabbard — a fresh-faced conservative who “saw the error of her ways” and left the Democratic Party to buy into the MAGA movement — to make her case for why Barack Obama committed treason.
I don’t see it that way. I see it as Van Susteren doing her job, and doing it correctly. Where things went wrong, in my eyes, was when she got off-topic in an attempt to play the “Those dirty rotten Democrats are always trying to do shady stuff” by using the disinformation letter as a quasi-case-in-point argument. It didn’t work, it fell flat, and it undermined her objectivity in the moment, from where I sit.
But from watching the entire episode, I came away with some other thoughts. There’s an old phrase I like to use sometimes that says “The key to knowledge is to know thyself.” Greta Van Sustern knows herself.
The Record with Greta Van Susteren leans into the host’s strengths — hard news coverage, legal analysis, and in-depth interviews. Van Susteren’s presence gives Newsmax added credibility as it continues to compete for cable news viewers in a fractured media environment. With a reputation for being thorough, direct, and fair, she remains one of the most recognizable names in political journalism. And that was on display in this episode, even if I didn’t always love her approach.
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Garrett Searight is Barrett Media’s News Editor, which includes writing daily news stories, features, and opinion columns. He joined Barrett Media in 2022 after a decade leading several radio brands in several formats, as well as a 5-year stint working in local television. In addition to his work with Barrett Media, he is a radio and TV play-by-play broadcaster. Reach out to him at Garrett@BarrettMedia.com.
