Trump Takes a Victory Lap After C-SPAN’s Steve Scully Admits to Lying About Being Hacked: ‘I Was Right Again!’
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President Donald Trump took a victory lap on Thursday after the revelation C-SPAN had suspended political editor Steve Scully for admitting he lied about being the victim of a Twitter hack, and accused the Commission on Presidential Debates of being “filled” with Democrats.
“I was right again!” Trump wrote on Twitter. “Steve Scully just admitted he was lying about his Twitter being hacked. The Debate was Rigged! He was suspended from C-SPAN indefinitely. The Trump campaign was not treated fairly by the ‘Commission’. Did I show good instincts in being the first to know?
I was right again! Steve Scully just admitted he was lying about his Twitter being hacked. The Debate was Rigged! He was suspended from @cspan indefinitely. The Trump Campaign was not treated fairly by the “Commission”. Did I show good instincts in being the first to know?
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 15, 2020
He added in a second message: “I will be doing a major Fake @NBCNews Town Hall Forum, live tonight from Miami, at 8:00 P.M. They asked me to do it in place of the Rigged Steve Scully (he is now suspended from @cspan for lying) Debate. I wonder if they’ll treat me as well as Sleepy Joe? They should!”
The Trump campaign’s communications director, Tim Murtaugh, took the development as an opportunity to blast the debate commission as well as Scully.
“Having a debate moderator lie to try to explain away a tweet that revealed his anti-Trump slant is bad, but it is far from the biggest problem with the biased Commission on Presidential Debates,” Murtaugh wrote in a statement issued little more than an hour after the news about Scully broke. “Filled with pro-Biden Democrats and anti-Trump ‘Republicans,’ the commission has done the bidding of Joe Biden every step of the way and protected him at every turn. There was no medical reason the candidates could not be on stage together tonight in Miami for the second debate, but instead they will be holding separate town halls. Everything the commission has done has been to benefit Joe Biden.”
Scully, who also hosts C-SPAN’s Washington Journal, had been selected by the Commission on Presidential Debates to moderate an October 15 event between Trump and Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden. However, after Trump criticized the 60-year-old Scully for an internship he took with Biden’s Senate office decades ago, he wrote in a public message to former Trump aide Anthony Scaramucci, “@Scaramucci Should I respond to trump.”
He subsequently deleted the post and conveyed to Mediaite, among others, that he intended not to send it as a personal message to Scaramucci, but that he had been hacked.
“I falsely claimed that my Twitter account had been hacked,” Scully said in a Thursday statement to the Associated Press. “I ask for their forgiveness as I try to move forward in a moment of reflection and disappointment in myself.”
Trump pulled out of the Oct. 15 presidential debate Scully had been scheduled to host earlier this month, after the commission announced that it would be conducted as a virtual event rather than in-person. Biden quickly followed suit.
Instead of the debate, Trump will appear at an NBC News town hall in Miami at 8:00 p.m. Biden will participate in an ABC News town hall in Philadelphia at the same time.
A final debate between the candidates is scheduled to take place on Oct. 22 in Nashville.
