Bob Beckel says his departure from Fox News wasn’t all it appeared to be.

The former Fox News contributor claimed over the weekend that his termination from Fox News in 2017 was actually orchestrated to get him out rather than the result of an insensitive remark he had allegedly made.

Beckel spoke about his firing on “The Weekend Report” on St. Louis-based KFTK 97.1 FM Saturday, acknowledging that he was violating his confidentiality agreement in doing so even though he had told producers ahead that he wouldn’t be able to answer questions about his termination due to legal reasons.

“I figured he wouldn’t be able to talk about it, you know,” TWR host Tony Colombo told The Daily Caller.

“And that’s what he told my producer, that for legal reasons he couldn’t say anything. But then just as we were wrapping up the show, I was saying thanks for coming on, and he said, ‘Can I just say one more thing?’ And then he said he knew he wasn’t allowed to talk about it but he didn’t care anymore,” Columbo explained.

Fox News announced in May 2017 that the former host of “The Five” was fired “for making an insensitive remark to an African-American employee.” Beckel had only just returned to network that year after being fired already in June 2015 due to battles with alcoholism and drug abuse.

A vocal Trump critic, Beckel had often raised the ire of Fox News viewers by bashing the president as he did on his return to the network when he locked horns with Tucker Carlson and accused President Trump of lying about the Muslim crime wave in Sweden.

On Saturday, Beckel contended that the racism allegations that supposedly led to his firing were not true and that he was pushed out due to his negative commentary on Trump.

“I’ve decided to use your radio show to be the first time I will say this to anybody, and that is in my view that I was completely set up by someone, and my guess is they may be outside the White House, and I was set up on an absurd, racist comment,” Beckel said. “People who know me were shocked that that would happen. Well, they were shocked because it didn’t happen.”

He claimed that former Trump attorney Michael Cohen had called and told him not to speak negatively of the president whom he was still working for at the time.

“Trump and I had known each other for a long time. I don’t like him, he doesn’t like me, that’s fine,” Beckel said. “But the fact that I was set up like that, no appeal, no chance to make my case … this was not about a racist comment. This was because I was the loudest voice on that network against Donald Trump.”

“There you have it, as far as I’m going, although I’m taking some action in the next six months to try to redress that,” Beckel added.

He also admitted he had just violated the terms of his exit contract with Fox News by making the remarks he had just spoken.

“I have broken that agreement, and that’s too bad,” he said.

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Frieda Powers

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Originally from New York, Powers graduated from New York University and eventually made her way to sunny South Florida where she has been writing for the BizPacReview team since 2015.

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