Fox Business benches pro-Trump frequent guest over undisclosed payments from Trump campaign

Mark Serrano, a longtime Republican operative, has been one of President Trump's most stalwart defenders on TV over the past few months, making semi-regular appearances on Fox Business Network and Fox News. Since at least April, he has also been a paid consultant for Trump's 2020 re-election campaign, according to federal disclosure forms the Trump campaign filed last weekend, The Washington Post reported Wednesday night. In April and May, the Trump campaign paid Serrano's firm, ProActive Communications, a total of $30,000 for "communications consulting," and during that time, his ties to the Trump campaign were not identified by the Fox networks.

That's because Serrano had not told the network about his hiring by the Trump campaign until late June, people at Fox tell the Post. In his most recent appearance, on July 6, Fox Business identified him as "Trump's campaign senior adviser," and a "person familiar with the network's internal discussions" tells the Post that Serrano won't appear on the network "for the foreseeable future" because he did not disclose his hiring by Trump. "It is the policy of the network to disclose all ties our guests have to any subject matter," Fox Business said Monday, "and in the case of Mark Serrano, as soon as we were made aware of his new title last month, we made sure to disclose his role during his on-air appearances."

An official at the Trump re-election committee said Serrano was paid for communication strategy, not his pro-Trump Fox appearances, and noted, accurately, that Serrano has been speaking favorably about Trump on Fox since at least August 2015, at no charge for most of that time.

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Editor's note: A previous version of the headline on this article misidentified the network that benched Serrano. It has been corrected. We regret the error.