GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy wrote a letter to ABC News President Goldston demanding ABC hand over the video Amy Robach conducted re: Epstein
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy sent a letter to ABC News on Sunday demanding the network explain why it quashed a story that would have exposed sex assault allegations against Jeffrey Epstein three years ago, but viewers who rely on ABC, NBC and CBS’ morning news programs would have no idea.
“All three morning shows on Monday ignored the move by Congress to investigate ABC covering up the network’s burying of the Jeffrey Epstein story back in 2016,” Media Research Center associate editor Scott Whitlock wrote.
The controversial group Project Veritas published a leaked video earlier this month showing ABC News anchor Amy Robach complaining that her network had spiked her reporting on now-deceased sex offender Epstein three years ago.
ABC initially downplayed the significance of the scandalous video but now lawmakers are pressuring the Disney-owned network, asserting, “What appears to have been presented to Ms. Robach is first-hand evidence of human trafficking.”
House Foreign Affairs Committee Ranking Member Mike McCaul, R-Texas, and House Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Doug Collins, R-Ga., also signed the letter.
They noted they were “deeply concerned that this victim, in search of justice, went to ABC News, provided information and an interview and then ABC News chose to bury the truth. This was a decision that Ms. Robach alluded was due to protecting powerful people or financial interests.”
ABC’s “Good Morning America” didn’t cover the damning report about its own network, and NBC’s “Today” and “CBS This Morning” also didn’t find time for the story, according to NewsBusters.
ABC News did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the letter.
Robach admitted the authenticity of the video moments after it was released, but dismissed the notion of unethical journalism.
“As a journalist, as the Epstein story continued to unfold last summer, I was caught in a private moment of frustration. I was upset that an important interview I had conducted with [Epstein accuser] Virginia Roberts didn’t air because we could not obtain sufficient corroborating evidence to meet ABC’s editorial standards about her allegations,” Robach said in a statement provided to Fox News earlier this month.
McCarthy and the other Republicans wrote in the Sunday letter, “Although it is unclear whether anyone thought to alert authorities to further examine these deeply disturbing allegations, it is clear that ABC News’ enabling of Mr. Epstein has consequences: fewer victims willing to come forward to bring perpetrators of this modern-day slavery to justice and, more grievously, the possibility that any number of minors could have been spared from human trafficking over the past three years.”
The three Republicans wrote that they were requesting more information from ABC News. They asked if the network will provide Congress with the interview Robach conducted with the victim, what ABC News learned about Epstein after Robach first presented her story to executives and who was involved in deciding the story was not of public interest as well as any rationale for that decision.
Prosecutors alleged that the convicted sex offender paid girls as young as 14 hundreds of dollars for massages before he molested them in his homes in New York and Palm Beach, Fla., between 2002 and 2005.
Brian Flood covers the media for Fox News. Follow him on Twitter at @briansflood.