Geraldo Rivera, the veteran Fox News personality who left the network in late June, spoke with Mediaite’s editor in chief Aidan McLaughlin and senior reporter Diana Falzone this week and revealed some inside details about the fallout from Tucker Carlson’s historical revisionism surrounding Jan. 6th.

The exchange began with Falzone asking Rivera about the dynamic on The Five, where tensions between him and a fellow co-host he has avoided naming led to his ouster. Rivera was a co-host on the top-rated panel program until being let go from the show, which was the catalyst for his eventual quitting of the network.

“I have heard rumblings from Fox News insiders that the tension was between you and Fox’s Greg Gutfeld, who at one point actually berated you on Twitter for objecting to Tucker Carlson’s coverage of January 6th. What happened there?” Falzone asked.

“Well, you know, I don’t want to focus in on any particular person, you can read the record, but I can tell you what happened vis a vis me and Tucker because that was the real substantive part of it,” Rivera replied.

Rivera spoke out publicly against Carlson’s widely-criticized commentary on the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol — commentary that eventually landed Fox News in a defamation suit. At one point, Rivera called Carlson’s claims “bullshit” in interviews with several papers, which he said he was suspended for.

Rivera told The Interview:

I was shocked and outraged. I mean, I was nauseous over Tucker Carlson’s premise that 9/11, not 9/11, that January 6th was an inside job. So Tucker Carlson began floating the idea, and I didn’t know why. I assumed it was just evidence-based in his own mind. Floating the idea that January 6th was fake, that it was government agents that staged it, the agents provocateur who aggravated everything, that there was no you know, President Trump did not incite a legitimate riot.

Then what happened is he made his remarks and then, you know, deep state operators basically took advantage of it to make Trump look bad, which was preposterous. It was ridiculous. It was you know, I actually said it was bullshit, is what I said to The Washington Post or The New York Times. I forget one or the other because I did several interviews between those two papers at the time.

“I got calls from within Fox. Right on. You know, we’re shocked, we’re outraged by what Tucker is trying to do. Thank you for speaking out, you know from people that could not speak out,” Rivera said, revealing frustration within the network at Carlson’s Jan. 6th conspiracy theories.

“You know, I even advised some prominent people just to cool it, that I could, I’ll take the heat because I felt that I was more bulletproof. I mixed my metaphors there, but I felt that I could say things that others, perhaps more vulnerable in their or more early in their careers, could not say. And so I was suspended for that,” Rivera added before pivoting to Gutfeld.

“I was suspended whenever, you know, Gutfeld and I had a head-to-head with two incidents, one on abortion rights. I call them insulting punk, and another I forget what it was. They always took his side. So, you know, it’s like. I was. I could sense that I was hanging by a thread. Anyway, there’s another metaphor. But the way it came down, they made a very pragmatic decision, a business decision,” he concluded.

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