Elisabeth Hasselbeck sure can hold a grudge.
After learning that her former View colleague might return to the program for its eighteenth season, the Fox & Friends co-host called into her new show to dredge up old drama. Hasselbeck, who is on vacation, brought up her infamous fight with O'Donnell, which led to the comic's premature exit from the show.
"What could ruin a vacation more than to hear news like this?" Hasselbeck asked Steve Doocy and Brian Kilmeade. "I know Rosie very well. We worked quite closely. Talk about not securing the border! Here in comes to The View the very woman who spit in the face of our military, spit in the face of her own network, and really in the face of a person who stood by her and had civilized debates for the time that she was there, coming back with a bunch of control ready to regain a seat at the View table."
According to Hasselbeck, O'Donnell's possible re-hiring is "not surprising" at all. As the conservative television personality explained to her co-hosts, "I think this has been in the works for a long time."
"I'll go back to the reunion show for [Barbara Walters]. How odd is this, when you have the woman, who again, insinuated that our own troops were terrorists in Iraq at the time, then left the show...to have such ease the day of Barbara's goodbye show was shocking to me? She walked around with a lot of control and I had the chance to talk to her," the Survivor alum, 37, said. She continued, "Rosie herself told me, on-set, while we were mic'ed up, that she produced the reunion show to have everybody together and it was her idea. Now, would you think that the woman who left in the way that she did would be producing Barbara's goodbye show? Here's the shocker: It was actually her hello show."
Hasselbeck said she will be "very interested" to see how O'Donnell and Whoopi Goldberg might interact, particularly because Goldberg is an EGOT winner and O'Donnell is not. "I don't think it would be wise for Rosie O'Donnell to challenge Whoopi Goldberg on anything. I really don't," she warned. "And I would also say that after years of being there, Rosie found out one thing about me: Don't mess with a pregnant mama and do not mess with our military when it comes to this girl sitting next to her."
When O'Donnell made her first appearance on the show in February 2014 since leaving the show seven years earlier, she joked about their feud. Hasselbeck, who played nice with O'Donnell when cameras rolled in May 2014, also dropped another secret about The View's reunion episode. "I do believe that this has been in the works for a long, long time. She wanted to re-do the split-screen and voice it over from our original confrontation right there. I was not up for that," she recalled. "She seemed to have a lot of control for Barbara's farewell show. Again, it is Rosie O'Donnell's hello show, in my opinion."
Though she may sound bitter, Hasselbeck is much happier on a different network. "I could not be more thankful to be at Fox & Friends. You all are an outstanding group," she said. "I'm so thankful. Days like this remind me of that. You're all doing a great job. Mark my words, this is just the beginning—again!"