Giuliani Admits Trump Campaign Had Complete Editorial Control Over OAN Reporter
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A legal filing shows Rudy Giuliani claiming that the Trump Campaign held editorial authority over a One America News Network reporter who worked with their attempts to dispute the results of the 2020 election.
The Daily Beast obtained a deposition from the defamation lawsuit Giuliani is facing from Eric Cooper, a former employee of Dominion Voting Systems. The release comes weeks after the revelations of a Trump Campaign internal memo showing they knew Giuliani and his cohorts were falsely claiming that the election was corrupted by mass fraud.
The new court documents show that Giuliani, the former personal lawyer to ex-president Donald Trump’s, spoke of an “agreement” he had with Charles Herring, president of OAN. The arrangement was to have Christina Bobb, a reporter with the right-wing network, come work with the campaign’s legal efforts.
“She came over to the campaign and she offered to help us,” Giuliani said. “And my staff said she was terrific, she was very trustworthy and if we could work out an agreement with One America News, it would be very helpful. She was a very good investigator.”
Giuliani goes on to say that he and Herring acknowledged a “conflict issue” with having Bobb on board. This led to Giuliani saying he gave Herring rules that OAN would defer to the Trump Campaign in terms of what Bobb would be allowed to report.
From the deposition, pages 90-93:
Yes, the rules that we made with Charles were that he would defer to us to whatever our needs were, that he couldn’t give it to us permanently but he could loosen up her assignments for the next couple of months…They said they would take her off communication she had, OAN would be treated for that purpose the way any other news organization is, and then if she did develop a discrete, good story, she would have to run it past us so it didn’t violate any of our rules or whatever. And I was pretty comfortable they would live by it because they had before.
In recent months, Bobb has continued questioning the 2020 election results, and she has repeatedly asked OAN viewers to donate to her organization as it attempted to audit the results of several states. Bobb has also been reportedly in contact with Trump, which has been a source of amusement to others close to the ex-president.
