Two prominent Fox News hosts locked horns over Donald Trump after anchor Megyn Kelly criticized Trump for only agreeing to interviews with her colleague Sean Hannity. The latter fired back on Twitter and accused Kelly of supporting Hillary Clinton.

The brouhaha was sparked when Kelly criticized both Clinton and Trump for only taking questions from friendly interviewers. Kelly, on her television show the Kelly File on Wednesday night, said: “Donald Trump, with all due respect to my friend at 10 o’clock, will go on Hannity and pretty much only Hannity and will not venture out to the unsafe spaces these days, which doesn’t exactly expand the tent.”

The statement prompted Hannity to tweet: “@megynkelly u should be mad at @HillaryClinton Clearly you support her. And @realDonaldTrump did talk to u.”

@megynkelly u should be mad at @HillaryClinton Clearly you support her. And @realDonaldTrump did talk to u. https://t.co/vsQiNMgHut — Sean Hannity (@seanhannity) October 6, 2016

The exchange is the latest drama at the conservative-leaning cable news channel, rife with internal dissension since it was revealed that longtime CEO Roger Ailes had allegedly engaged in serial sexual harassment over decades. The revelations led to the July resignation of Ailes, who led the network since its founding in 1996. Ailes has gone on to become an informal adviser to the Trump campaign.

Kelly herself became a campaign issue in the summer of 2015 after she moderated the first Republican primary debate. Trump took exception to her tough questioning and, in an interview on CNN the following day, made what was widely interpreted as a reference to menstruation when he suggested she “had blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever”. The resulting uproar led Trump to be banned from a major gathering of conservatives and sparked the biggest crisis of his campaign up to that point.

Since then Kelly has continued to be a target of Trump, who called her “crazy Megyn” in March and even tweeted at her during Tuesday’s vice-presidential debate.

In contrast, Hannity has appeared in an advertisement for Trump and constantly spoken of the Republican nominee in glowing terms. Trump has appeared in a number of one-on-one primetime interviews with the Fox News host and even cited Hannity as a character witness in the first presidential debate.

“Nobody called Sean Hannity,” Trump complained when asked why there was no evidence for his claims that he had opposed the second Iraq war (in fact, Trump is on the record saying he supported the invasion of Iraq in 2002).