When President Donald Trump claimed in a Monday Cabinet meeting that “we never gave a commitment to the Kurds,” the U.S. ally recently abandoned in northern Syria, an immediate rebuke came from a source not easily dismissed as “fake news”: a Fox News correspondent.

“Not true,” Jennifer Griffin tweeted. “According to a former top senior military adviser to President Trump, ‘We told them over and over ‘We are your friends. We will never leave you.’”


The tweet was a sign of Griffin’s emergence as the reporter most willing to fact-check and contradict Trump’s claims about Syria to an audience accustomed to less critical coverage. Griffin’s early revelation that Trump had “gone off script” in his fateful phone call with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan before Turkey’s invasion of Syria gave many conservatives the grist to question Trump’s actions. And her continued efforts to push back against Trump’s assertions have thwarted the White House’s efforts to portray the Turkish action against the Kurds as inevitable.

Griffin told POLITICO that her tweet contradicting Trump on promises to the Kurds was based on a conversation with “someone extremely senior” that took place the previous night and has been part of what’s been “a wild two weeks” reporting on the Syria withdrawal. “I am able to fact-check because I am constantly gathering information,” she said.

While Trump enjoys unwavering support at Fox News from several opinion hosts and supportive guests, a daily cheering section that serves as media firewall in the face of impeachment, the president’s claims about withdrawing troops, and thereby allowing Turkey to launch an offensive in northern Syria, have come under near-constant scrutiny from Griffin, a veteran national security correspondent at the network.

Griffin’s critical reporting in recent weeks has not only found a home on several daytime Fox News programs, albeit not in prime time, but has been cited by competitors like MSNBC’s Willie Geist and CNN’s Christiane Amanpour. Members of U.S. special forces, Amanpour told Defense Secretary Mark Esper, “are telling even Fox News — that’s an ally of president Trump…that they feel ashamed.”


A Republican critic of the Syria withdrawal, Illinois Rep. Adam Kinzinger, referenced Griffin’s reporting on CNN, while conservative writers like Peggy Noonan, Peter Wehner, and Jonah Goldberg have done so in pieces opposing the decision. Goldberg noted that Griffin’s reporting is coming from Fox News, which is “not normally a target of Trump’s ‘fake news’ broadsides.”

“I’m pleased at the fact that other networks are paying attention to what Fox News is doing, but the way I feel is, we’ve been doing this for years,” Griffin said in an interview with POLITICO. She said Fox News reporters “keep our nose to the grindstone” and “keep out of politics.”

That can be difficult as Trump, a faithful Fox News viewer, has blasted journalists who have challenged his claims, such as veteran anchor Shepard Smith, who abruptly left the network earlier this month amid tensions with the pro-Trump opinion side.

“I certainly was very saddened to see that Shepard was leaving us,” said Griffin, who considers the former Fox News anchor a close friend from their more than two decades at the network. But, she said, “We’re not doing anything differently since he left.”


Griffin’s work on the Syria story began a few days before Smith exited Fox News. She and husband Greg Myre, an NPR national security correspondent, returned to the U.S. from an anniversary trip in Morocco on Oct. 6 to find Trump announcing plans to withdraw troops in Syria.

“This came as a surprise to everyone — not just reporters, but members of the national security establishment,” Griffin said. “Much of the Pentagon was caught off guard. The State Department was caught off guard.”

Griffin, who had spent years reporting from the Middle East before starting on the Pentagon beat in 2007, began contacting sources, and said she and colleague Lucas Tomlinson started piecing together “what the reality was, because there was a lot of confusion and misinformation.”

On the afternoon of Oct. 7, Griffin reported on Fox News how U.S. officials and allies were blindsided by Trump’s decision. Two days later, she reported how Trump “went off script” during his call with Erdogan, whom he was expected to tell to stay north of the Syrian border.

That same day, Griffin tweeted thoughts from a distraught “U.S. Special Forces soldier” who fought alongside the Kurds and said he was “ashamed for the first time in my career.” The string of tweets went viral, drawing more than 400,000 likes and retweets and surely contributed to Griffin adding at least 20,000 Twitter followers this month.

In another widely shared tweet, Griffin last week accused Trump of pushing a “Turkish talking point” that the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) is “a greater threat than ISIS.” On Sunday, she posted several tweets from a call with Kurdish general Mazloum Kobani Abdi, a key U.S. partner in the fight against ISIS, who accused accused Turkey of ignoring a cease fire and continuing its “ethnic cleansing” in northern Syria.

The next night, Griffin interviewed former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen at the University of Chicago, and was back at the Pentagon on Tuesday, reporting on Turkey and Russia’s deal to jointly patrol along the safe zone at the Syria border.

Griffin also appeared this week on a Fox News Radio show with Brian Kilmeade, a co-host on Trump favorite “Fox & Friends,” who has expressed criticism of the Syria move. Yet Griffin has not appeared in recent weeks on any Fox News opinion shows, which she said isn’t unusual as her TV appearances typically occur between 11 a.m. and 7 p.m.


“They’re in the opinion-making business,” Griffin said of the primetime line-up. “And they’re having guests on who can commentate on the news reports that we’ve put out during the day. That’s usually how they structure their shows. But there’s no hard and fast rule that I can’t appear on there.”

Griffin acknowledged that some people who don’t know her “might make certain assumptions” because of her employer, though she believes that most “view me as an individual.”

That assessment jibes with those of her colleagues in the Pentagon press corps.

“As far as the Pentagon press corps goes, she’s one of us,” said Jeff Schogol, a Pentagon reporter at Task & Purpose. “It’s not that Jennifer’s the Pentagon Fox reporter, she’s a Pentagon reporter. So of course, standards of accuracy and fairness are the same for her as anyone else.”

Kevin Baron, executive editor of Defense One, called Griffin “a pro's pro” and “one of the best reporters I've seen my decade on the Pentagon beat.”

“Her reputation as a hard-hitting, straight-talking journalist is known by her peers and respected worldwide throughout the military from generals to grunts,” said Baron. “Never seen her pull a punch. Would be shocked if she ever did.”

