The aftermath of the second US presidential debate in the 2024 election cycle is quite different from the first one. Unlike the one between President Biden and President Trump, the more recent one between Vice President Harris and President Trump shifted polling and betting odds towards the Democrats, although not to the same extent. President Trump has to weather a much lighter shift than President Biden did.
Similarly, much of the discussion among Republicans is not about his performance, rather the conduct of the moderators. ABC News anchors David Muir and Linsey Davis routinely stepped in to fact-check President Trump’s remarks, while ‘forgetting’ to do the same for Kamala Harris.
Of these voices on the right, Beth Brelje for The Federalist went further than most. In the headline for her opinion piece, she calls for ABC News to be prosecuted for illegal campaign contributions for the way they managed the debate.
‘They allowed Harris more time to respond and followed her when she veered off topic, but gave Trump no such breaks. It was not a debate, but a campaign contribution. That’s not a big surprise from either moderator, as Muir hosts the most Trump-negative network news evening broadcast and Davis has a long track record of promoting Democrat talking points including stolen election claims from Hillary Clinton,’ she wrote.
The author is making the case that the debate moderation should be considered a non-monetary, so-called ‘in-kind contribution,’ as per the nomenclature of the Federal Election Commission (FEC); or an ‘independent expenditure,’ which she defines as ‘an expenditure for a communication, such as a television advertisement, that advocates for the election or defeat of a candidate and is not made in cooperation with the candidate’. She estimates the value of this contribution, based on the cost of advertisement per second during the broadcast, to be around $40.5 million. Evidently, that exceeds the legal limit to campaign contributions.
To add fuel to the fire on the right, an X user by the handle @DocNetyoutube claimed in a post that he is in contact with an alleged whistleblower from ABC News. The alleged contact is willing to sign an affidavit saying that ABC gave the Harris campaign ‘sample questions’ that were almost identical to the ones asked during the debate; and that they had assured her and her team that she would not be fact-checked, but President Trump would be.
In the original post, the X user has promised to release the affidavit ‘before the weekend is out,’ but has not done so as of the time of writing this. Meanwhile, ABC News has denied on the record that they had shared debate questions with Vice President Harris.
Such an act would not be unprecedented, however. During the 2016 election campaign, former Democratic National Committee interim chair Donna Brazile admitted to having leaked topics to the Hillary Clinton camp before the CBS News town hall between Clinton and Trump in October 2016. Well, guess which outlet Donna Brazile works with now as a contributor.
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