Critics once again are questioning the objectivity of debate moderator Steve Scully after his cryptic tweet Thursday night ahead of the scheduled debate in Miami between President Trump and Joe Biden.
Scully, who interned for Biden early in his career, wrote a tweet that appeared to be directed at former White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci, who has turned against the president, Fox News reported.
“@Scaramucci should I respond to trump,” wrote Scully, the political editor of C-SPAN and the host of Washington Journal.
Scaramucci, who was in the Trump administration for only 10 days in 2017, replied: “Ignore. He is having a hard enough time. Some more bad stuff about to go down.”
Some Twitter users concluded Scully meant to send the message privately.
Politico reporter Alex Thompson said it was an “odd thing for the next debate moderator to tweet.”
The town hall debate scheduled for Oct. 15 in Miami is in doubt after the Commission on Presidential Debates announced Thursday it had been changed to a virtual event and President Trump said he would not participate.
“This is not going to help the idea that Scully is *in any way* an objective and unbiased journalist and moderator,” said Curtis Houck of Newsbusters said of the tweet.
DailyMail.com noted that in 2016, Scully tweeted an opinion piece titled “No, Not Trump, Not Ever.”
He volunteered for the Jimmy Carter campaign in 1976 and worked as a media intern for Ted Kennedy in 1979.
Trump said late Thursday: “But I will say this, that it is a very sad thing. Now you have, the debate commission’s a joke. The commission’s a joke.”
Rebeccah Heinrichs of the Hudson Institute said the tweet Thursday is “disqualifying.”
Twitchy, which monitors statements on Twitter, said later that “the sad strange saga of Steve Scully just keeps getting better. After getting caught appearing to coordinate with Anthony Scaramucci – which is not a great look for a guy who’s supposed to moderate the next presidential debate – Scully tried to delete the evidence and accidentally deleted his entire Twitter account.”
Further, it reported, “now there’s this cleanup attempt from Frank Fahrenkopf, co-chair of the Commission on President Debates:
CPD Co-Chair Frank Fahrenkopf tells @kilmeade on “The Brian Kilmeade Show” in regards to @SteveScully tweet to @Scaramucci: “He was hacked, it didn’t happen.”
— Pat Ward (@WardDPatrick) October 9, 2020
That claim was that Scully’s account “was hacked.”
During the first debate, moderator Chris Wallace was criticized for interrupting Trump more than Biden.
The moderator of the vice-presidential debate Wednesday, Susan Page, is in the middle of “writing a glowing biography of Speaker Pelosi.”
