President Trump weighed in Sunday on the controversy of ABC News quashing a story about Jeffrey Epstein’s abuse and declared “we no longer have Freedom of the Press!”
Trump’s tweet follows the firing of a CBS news employee who allegedly leaked the hot mic revelation when she was working at ABC — which the young producer tearfully denies.
“ABC is as bad as the rest of them. Journalistic standards are nonexistent today. The press is so dishonest that we no longer have Freedom of the Press!,” Trump tweeted.
The president was responding to a tweet from James O’Keefe, the self-proclaimed “guerrilla journalist” and founder of Project Veritas that exposed a hot-mic moment from ABC News anchor Amy Robach.
In the video clip, Robach complains that three years ago she interviewed an alleged victim of Epstein, Virginia Roberts Giuffre and had the story on Epstein’s sex abuse, but ABC wouldn’t air it. She mentioned they had nailed down allegations and mentions former President Bill Clinton, lawyer Alan Dershowitz and Prince Andrew.
She complains that the ABC brass downplayed the story on Epstein because “No one knows who that is” and because the Royal Family threatened the network.
“The Palace found out that we had her whole allegations about Prince Andrew and threatened us a million different ways,” Robach says in an off-the-cuff vent.
Prince Andrew, Clinton and Dershowitz have denied allegations of any wrongdoing.
Robach has said in a statement that the network never intentionally killed the Epstein piece and called the recordings “a private moment of frustration.”
CBS News has since fired a 25-year-old producer, Ashley Bianco, who ABC News had identified — wrongly, she insists — as the leaker of the hot mic tape.
Trump was retweeting an O’Keefe post that included a TV segment from Fox News’ Jesse Watters where the TV host bashes ABC for “smearing” Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh with allegations of sexual misconduct while failing to air the reports against Epstein.
“Where the hell are ABC’s editorial standards,” O’Keefe tweeted, quoting the Watters segment.