For weeks, liberal TV news have showered Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s legal team with friendly press. So far this month, the attorneys defending Garcia, the deported illegal alien from El Salvador, have sat for 28 friendly interviews on corporate media airwaves, or more than one per day.
MRC analysts combed through SnapStream recordings and Nexis transcripts from April 1 through April 23 for every interview of Garcia’s attorneys on liberal broadcast (ABC, CBS, and NBC) and cable (CNN and MSNBC) networks. Throughout those 23 days, five lawyers representing Garcia — Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg, Rina Gandhi, Benjamin Osorio, Chris Newman, and Alexandra Ribe — were interviewed a total of 28 times.
While most aired on cable channels, it was the April 1 edition of CBS Evening News that televised the first interview. The attorney in question was Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg, who would go on to appear in a total of fourteen interviews in the first two weeks of April.
CNN aired by far the most sit-downs with Garcia’s lawyers: sixteen in total, or just over half. MSNBC ran ten such interviews over the same period, while ABC and CBS were responsible for the remaining two.
Unsurprisingly, none were even remotely adversarial. While some hosts saw fit to throw in the odd token challenge or straw man here or there, almost all of the questions these lawyers faced were overwhelmingly sympathetic. In fact, anchors spent most of their time commiserating with Garcia’s attorneys.
During an April 2 interview on CNN, host Erin Burnett seemed so convinced of Garcia’s innocence that she wondered if perhaps his case would be a turning point for Trump supporters. To Sandoval-Moshenberg she inquired: “Do you think your client’s situation, his deportation, could make other Trump supporters, maybe even other Republican officials, think twice about what Trump is doing on deportations?”
On April 15, MSNBC’s Christina Ruffini attempted to downplay Garcia’s ties to MS-13 while interviewing attorney Rina Gandhi: “You know, we all change… Maybe he did some things earlier in his life that they could be talking about? Or is there just, in your opinion, no evidence to support this whatsoever?”
And just last week, on April 18, CNN host Kaitlan Collins sought reassurance from Gandhi that her legal team would be able to keep Garcia from being deported elsewhere if they managed to secure his release:
We had the border czar, Tom Homan, on last night, and his argument that he made to me was, one, that that 2019 from an immigration judge, who technically was working for President Trump was meaningless. But he also said that if your client is brought back to the United States, he’ll just be deported again to a third country. If that happened, legally do you think you’d be able to prevent that.
Even as more damning evidence has emerged about Garcia’s past, the leftist TV networks have pressed doggedly onward with his legal team’s free publicity tour. It looks like they feel too dug in to attempt an about-face.
