The co-chair of the Commission on Presidential Debates has blamed two top Biden advisers for his campaign’s decision to forgo traditional debates and instead fight two previous battles with former President Trump.
Anita Dunn, an adviser to the Biden administration, and Ron Klain, a former White House chief of staff, are responsible for the campaign’s decision, said Frank Fahrenkopf, who served as chairman of the Republican National Committee at the time when the two major parties agreed to create a bipartisan commission on debates in the late 1980s.
“There was no doubt” that the letter the Biden campaign sent to the commission was the result of Dunn and Klain, Fahrenkopf said in an interview with the Politician.
Klain has represented Democratic presidential nominees in coordination with the commission since 2000.
President Biden’s campaign chair, Jen O’Malley Dillon, notified the committee in a letter Wednesday that she planned to work directly with news organizations to organize debates between Biden and Trump.
“As Donald Trump has said he will debate ‘anytime, anywhere,’ we hope that both campaigns can quickly accept invitations for media debates on the above parameters,” she said in the letter. “Americans need a debate about the issues – not a boring debate about debates.”
Trump quickly responded that he would accept the terms that the Biden campaign proposed for the debates to be held in June and September. CNN announced that it would present the first, and ABC soon after announced that it would present the second.
The move essentially sidelined the commission, which has organized presidential debates since 1988 and had previously announced dates for three presidential debates and a vice-presidential debate in the fall.
“I know where this is all going [from] – this is Anita Dunn,” Fahrenkopf told Politico. “This is her plan. I know. She fought – she was against the commission for years and years and years.”
He pointed to Dunn and Klain’s involvement in a 2015 report of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, who advocated reforms to the debate process, saying Dunn “hates us and always has.”
Fahrenkopf also rejected three criticisms that the Biden campaign cited as reasons for bypassing the commission to plan debates.
O’Malley Dillon’s letter argued that the debates were scheduled too late in the year because early voting had already begun, that they had become “noisy spectacles” filled with “disruptive supporters and donors,” and that the committee was “unwilling or unwilling could” to enforce his rules as Trump repeatedly interrupted Biden during a 2020 debate.
Fahrenkopf said the commission decided the debates should take place after Sept. 6 because not all states will finalize their votes by then. A key qualification in determining candidate eligibility is having enough votes so that a candidate can reach the 270 electoral votes needed to win the race.
Only a handful of states will have finalized their votes by the first debate next month.
Fahrenkopf said the accusation that the debates have become “noisy spectacles” is false.
“And they know it’s fake,” he said. “I mean, they were there last time. There’s no cheering going on.”
In response to criticism that the commission didn’t do enough to rein in Trump during the infamous 2020 debate, Fahrenkopf questioned what moderator Chris Wallace or anyone else could have done.
“What were we going to do?” he said. “Would I jump on stage? Chris did everything he could to say, ‘You’re not obeying the rules. You are breaking your own rules. So I don’t know what we could have done.”
Klain told Politico that he still maintained his criticism of the way the commission handled the debates, saying that the fact that millions of Americans voted before the first debate was “indisputable.” He said the debates are “gigantic, with huge crowds of donors to the host college and corporate sponsors of the CPD. This is also an indisputable fact.”
Dunn declined to comment to Politico.
But Fahrenkopf also said the campaign’s choice of Biden was a smart strategy, arguing that Biden gained an advantage from these developments. He said he read an analysis that he agreed “could end up being one of the big mistakes of the entire election cycle” for Trump.
This story originally appeared on thehill.com read the full story
