Fox News Correspondent Jennifer Griffin Explains How Benjamin Hall Got Out of Ukraine

By A.J. Katz 

In a recent conversation with People magazine, Fox News national security correspondent Jennifer Griffin described how the network’s state department correspondent Benjamin Hall was evacuated from Ukraine to Poland in less than 24 hours after he was wounded while covering Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Hall was wounded in March near Kyiv during an attack that killed Fox News cameraman Pierre Zakrzewski and local freelance producer Oleksandra Kuvshynova.

Griffin remarked that a Pentagon reporter asked her if the Fox News team in Ukraine was okay. Griffin hadn’t known what happened, so she called Fox News president Jay Wallace, who told her that Hall was wounded and that Zakrzewski and Kuvshynova were nowhere to be found.

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“So at that point, I said to Jay, ‘Do you want me to help?’” Griffin recalled. “And he said, ‘Yes.’”

Griffin then asked Pentagon Press Secretary John Kirby whether the U.S. could transport Hall to a military hospital if he was able to leave Ukraine and make it into Poland.

Once off the phone, Griffin says, she turned to Pentagon Press Secretary John Kirby, who happened to be standing just outside the Fox News booth.

While Kirby explained to her that the U.S. couldn’t assist in any sort of military effort inside of Ukraine (due to a presidential order that bans troops from crossing into the country), Griffin had another idea.

She proposed to Kirby that “if I can get Benjamin to the border, can you have a team from Landstuhl [military hospital] help him?”

Griffin told People she recalled Save Our Allies, a group dedicated to rescuing Americans and allies in war-torn countries, set up a base in Ukraine and was transporting Americans out of the country.

Sarah Verardo, who heads up Save Our Allies and is someone with whom Griffin has collaborated before, agreed to help Fox’s Ukraine team get out of the country.

Later, Griffin said a combat surgeon named Dr. Rich Jadick helped get Hall to safety in what was “a 12-hour journey to get Hall to the Polish border, which required transferring him to an ambulance and keeping him stabilized while traveling down pockmarked roads destroyed by Russian tanks in a country under attack.”

Once Hall got to the Ukraine-Poland border, the U.S. Army airlifted the Fox Newser to Landstuhl Hospital in Germany.

The most recent update we received in regards to Hall was on March 25, when Fox News chief executive Suzanne Scott told staffers that Hall was being treated in a hospital in San Antonio, and that the network was “in close contact with Ben and his family, and he remains in good spirits despite everything he has endured.”

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