Does Chuck Todd remember that he works for NBC News?
Aryssa Damron at the Washington Free Beacon reported on Friday night on his show MTP Daily, Todd declared "Michael Avenatti is probably the best thing to happen to Brett Kavanaugh. All these Democrats that have been flirting with him, they've got to really be embarrassed by him now." Some of those Democrats are the ones that put Avenatti's client, Julie Swetnick, on NBC News without confirming her allegations.
MSNBC's Steve Kornacki agreed with Todd, that when the "Avenatti circus comes to town, it changes the nature of the debate, it changes the terms of the debate."
"It diluted Dr. Ford, whatever you might think," Todd replied. "Something about Michael Avenatti might have cheapened the whole thing."
So is he saying "Wow, I can't believe WE cheapened the whole thing"?
"It was also the Deborah Ramirez allegation," added Sara Fagen, former political director in the George W. Bush White House. Ramirez claimed Kavanaugh exposed himself to her at Yale. "By her own account, [she] wasn't initially certain it was Brett … decided it was Brett after thinking about it. The New York Times, to their credit, wouldn't publish it."
"Twenty years ago, no major news publications would have even published … the second allegation or the third allegation," Fagen said, referring to Ramirez and Swetnick's accusations, respectively. "We are now in a different place in this country, where the message out of #MeToo, which has a very important message for society, has become conflated with politics, which is that ‘by any means necessary we can score a political win.'"
Todd didn't defend NBC on its reporting the second and third accusers. He threw another curveball: "You know, some of those allegations, I feel like most of those were actually leaked from the Judiciary Committee and may have been leaked by people intentionally trying to dilute things," Todd said.
So now NBC News was suckered by the Republicans?
