Mediaite, a leftist publication, has been caught lying in a blatant distortion of a transcript of an interview that now-Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) did years ago on MSNBC in an obvious attempt to interfere in former President Donald Trump’s vice presidential selection process.
The left-leaning anti-Trump publication ran a headline on Wednesday as part of the globalists’ last-ditch effort to stop Vance from getting selected as Trump’s running mate in the 2024 presidential election that, if true, would certainly make heads in Trump world turn: “JD Vance Said He Believes Trump’s Sexual Assault Accuser in Unearthed Interview.”
The problem with Mediaite’s headline — and its story — is that this is not an accurate reflection of what Vance said in a 2016 interview with then-MSNBC host Chris Matthews.
The actual transcript of the MSNBC interview from the October 12, 2016, Hardball show — which has hardly been “unearthed,” for what it is worth, as it is literally on the MSNBC website for anyone to find, but that is beside the point — shows Matthews playing a clip of Jessica Leeds, a woman who accused Trump of groping her, and then asking Vance for reaction.
Here is Matthews’s exact question: “What do you think of this? This is something, it’s sort of interesting evocative of the time because of the time because we used to say stewardess first of all. That was a flight attendant. It just gives us a sense of history. But this woman is not a showoff. She’s just telling what happened so we can know it.”
Here is Vance’s exact response: “Yes, yes. And it’s sort of – – it makes me think that at fundamental, this is sort of he said/she said, right? And at the end of the day, do you believe Donald Trump who always tells the truth? Just kidding, or do you believe that woman on the tape? And I —”
That is the end of the exchange. Vance literally said in his response that this was a “he said/she said” disagreement and questioned which person between the two people — Trump or Leeds — someone should believe.
Vance’s argument, for whatever it is worth, was far more pro-Trump than most MSNBC guests at the time, even though he was still a Trump critic back then. His conversion from critic to strong supporter of Trump is a widely known story, but the notion he was saying, as Mediaite claimed in this headline, that he believed the accuser is just not true because that is not what he said.
Where things get particularly interesting is that the author of the piece, Colby Hall, first off, did not, per multiple sources familiar with the matter, reach out to Vance’s team for comment ahead of time on the story. While it is a publicly available transcript on MSNBC’s website, Hall did not even include the video of the interview for the story, and mischaracterizing Vance’s comments like this is a significant development. What is more, in non-off-record conversations with Vance’s staff after the publication of the story, Hall admitted that headlines are not the full story — he literally told, per communications reviewed by Breitbart News, a Vance staffer that he “surmised” what he thought Vance meant to write the headline on this piece rather than accurately letting Vance’s word speak for themselves.
This instance is just the latest in a long line of examples of establishment media forces desperate to stop Trump from picking Vance as his running mate, as, in recent weeks, the New York Post’s editorial board and the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board both attacked Vance and pushed other possible candidates.