New evidence emerged over the weekend that ABC News colluded with the Kamala Harris campaign to tilt the first debate with Donald Trump in her favor. On Sunday, the X account “Black Insurrectionist” posted a document it claimed to be an affidavit from an anonymous ABC employee.
Among the explosive allegations were that ABC News shared “sample questions” with the Harris campaign that resembled the actual debate questions, that it bowed to Harris’s demands to place specific topics off-limits, and that it provided assurances to the Harris campaign that its moderators would bicker with Trump’s answers under the guise of “fact-checking.”
“It was agreed that Donald Trump would be subjected to fact-checking during the debate, while Kamala Harris would not face comparable scrutiny,” the affidavit read. “In fact, Harris campaign required assurance that Donald Trump would be fact checked. This was done via multiple communications with the Harris campaign whereas the Trump campaign was not included in the negotiations. To my understanding, any rules negotiations and conversations pertaining to the debate should have had both the Trump and Harris campaign involved…”
The whistleblower claimed to have signed a copy of the affidavit and mailed it before the debate. If true, the moderators’ conduct during the debate corroborated the whistleblower’s predictions. The moderators aggressively fact-checked Trump, and they asked no questions about the forbidden topics.
Among the forbidden topics ABC News allegedly agreed not to raise were “questions concerning her brother-in-law, Tony West, who faces allegations of embezzling billions of dollars in taxpayer funds ….”
Wait, what? The vice president’s sister, Maya, married Tony West in 1998. However, there’s no mention of any allegations of fraud or corruption in the recent New York Times piece profiling his influence in the Harris campaign.
Curiously, ABC News answered these charges with a statement provided to the Daily Beast by an unidentified spokesman :
ABC News has again insisted that no topics or questions were shared with either Vice President Kamala Harris or Donald Trump and their respective campaigns in advance of last week’s presidential debate. The network’s statement came after it declined to directly address allegations—made in an allegedly sworn statement, purportedly by one of its staff—that it helped Harris in the debate.
Further, the Daily Beast wrote, “A source familiar with the matter also dismissed the purported fact-check ‘assurances’ as untrue. Harris’ campaign did not respond to a request for comment on Monday.”
Is that anonymous source from ABC News, or some other organization? What is “the matter” with which this source is familiar? In the end, the statement provided to the Daily Beast is a very weak nondenial denial. It is telling that an ABC spokesperson doesn’t feel confident enough to go on record with a point-by-point denial. I made multiple requests to ABC through emails and a voicemail seeking its response to the affidavit’s allegations but have received no response.
The legacy media mischaracterize the concerns over ABC News’s collusion with the Harris campaign as a sour grapes over Trump’s supposedly having lost the debate. Whether Trump lost the debate is not the issue. The Democrats appointed Harris through an opaque and undemocratic process to shelter her from the bruising primary scrutiny that a normal nominee endures. Americans know very little about the potential next president, and ABC has allegedly colluded with the Harris campaign to continue that deception through a rigged debate.
The controversy calls to mind revelations that ABC and CNN contributor Donna Brazile fed questions in advance to the Clinton campaign in anticipation of a supposedly unscripted town hall event during the 2016 presidential campaign. One is also reminded that ABC News participated in one of the greatest journalistic coverups in history just last year, when it helped Democrats deflect questions regarding Biden’s mental state.
Until ABC News answers these concerns directly and transparently, it should be treated as a colluding political operative. The debate shenanigans were a deception intended to tilt the election in favor of its preferred candidate.
Leave a Reply