This slipped by everyone’s attention Thursday, but while Trump was getting indicted NBC News also ran a totally credulous interview with ex-Fox News producer Abby Grossberg, who claims Fox wants to make her the fall person in the Dominion case.
Did they do zero diligence on her?
Yes, Fox News is guilty at a corporate level. But seriously, Abby Grossberg is in no way innocent. Anybody can just read the documents released in the Dominion lawsuit, which reveal her to have been a tinfoil believer in the election lies *and* in corrupt pursuit of ratings.
From the segment:
Cynthia McFadden: “There are producers who would say, ‘I would walk out the door, I wouldn’t put something on the air that I couldn’t stand up factually.’”
Abby Grossberg: “I wish that I had the power to do that. I wanted to keep my job.”
This is laughable.
November 7, 2020: Grossberg receives an email from Maria Bartiromo, containing Bartiromo’s notes of a phone call with Sidney Powell. The notes lay out a vast conspiracy involving “Hammer and Scorecard,” as well as voting machines being “directed also by Soros.”
November 7, 2020: Abby Grossberg receives a forwarded email from Maria Bartiromo, containing the letter from the bizarre source that Sidney Powell had for voting machine claims, involving supernatural visions: mediamatters.org/fox-news/maria…
Grossberg on November 14, 2020: “Do we have to pull that statement from Dominion denying wrongdoing?”
Nov. 15, 2020: Grossberg sends a publicity email for Bartiromo’s interview w/ Powell, “the latest on her investigation into Dominion Voting Systems … and why she believes there’s enough evidence, including sworn affidavits, of wrongdoing to overturn the 2020 election results.”
On multiple occasions, Grossberg received Dominion’s “Setting The Record Straight” emails, along with an offer to get a Dominion spokesman (former House Republican aide Michael Steel) on the show directly.
Grossberg: “The win for Sidney is hope.”
Rare moment for of self-examination, Bartiromo wondered if she should’ve asked in an interview about a peaceful transition.
Grossberg: “To be honest, our audience doesn't want to hear about a peaceful transition. They still have hope.”
Abby Grossberg pushed claims (out of thin air) that judges were being threatened, and told Bartiromo that Republicans should run in the Georgia runoffs on a platform that Democrats were cheating and Republicans would “fight like hell.”
She also called Michael Flynn “brilliant.”
Grossberg and Bartiromo were upset, Fox anchor Eric Shawn fact-checked Trump’s election claims on Bartiromo’s show.
Grossberg: “It’s pathetic and also not a good look for fox … Perpetuates the narrative of post-election failure and infighting. … So desperate for attention.”
Grossberg criticized Jeanine Pirro for seemingly pulling back on election fraud claims. (Management made her, by the way!)
Grossberg said election-fraud talk was good for ratings: “74M people voted for trump. That’s a lot of potential viewers, They’re all missing the boat.”
Grossberg: “Sidney is right. He’s [Gov. Brian Kemp] totally getting kickbacks. The sec of state too, who is pushing those drop boxes and says signature matching is impossible.”
More of Grossberg: “Expert said he saw dominion communicating with Germany, which is where Ratcliffe said they have people”
All these documents are out in public. NBC News seemingly just didn’t look at them, and instead gave this person a fluff piece about how she was just some innocent and vulnerable person forced by her job to put crazy stuff on the air.
If an actual news organization is going to interview Abby Grossberg, you should confront her with the black-and-white proof of her absolute culpability in the election lies and her reckless disregard for the truth. You don’t let her do this whole routine, “It felt awful.”
Something I forgot to mention here, this was also a lie/Kool-Aid-drinking on Grossberg’s part. Georgia did signature matching: apnews.com/article/ap-fac…
Re-upping my thread above: Abby Grossberg is a thoroughly loathsome person. Any new evidence revealed here will just underscore how awful she was in pushing election conspiracy theories.
But hey, if she wants to go all Henry Hill, then do it. Just don’t forget it’s Henry Hill.
Further adding to my thread here: It’s remarkable that Abby Grossberg would share a tape of herself laughing it up with a goofy story about Sidney Powell on *Jan. 25, 2021*. (You know, in the immediate weeks after a violent coup attempt.)
4/24/23: “This is a step towards accountability for the election lies and baseless conspiracy theories spread by Fox News, something I witnessed firsthand at the network.”
11/30/20: “Sidney is right. He’s [Gov. Brian Kemp] totally getting kickbacks.”
This is kind of funny, Nicolle Wallace interviewing Abby Grossberg this hour. The “corrected” version of her deposition answer, about whether she trusted other producers at Fox, is like watching a mob witness flip in real time and spill everything.
Grossberg slipped up here, maybe a mental reversion? Described her dissatisfaction when “my boss said that when I had the first interview with President Donald Trump after he won the 2020 — after he lost, excuse me, the 2020 election, and Biden won — that it was holiday filler.”
Abby Grossberg says looking back she feels “stupid” and “embarrassed” about election, attributes it to being in the bubble. Now claims she knew Biden won around Nov. 15.
Well, the paper trail above shows she kept it up with Maria (and with gusto) for at least two more weeks!
The Bartiromo interview with Trump, which Grossberg just mentioned again as a job accomplishment where she didn’t get enough credit at Fox, was Nov. 29. (Trump and Bartiromo pushed all the big election lies.) mediamatters.org/maria-bartirom…
Yes, these people have dirt to spill about what’s gone on at Fox News. But let’s be a little more skeptical when they try to rehabilitate their images, and depict themselves as something else than just as rotten as the company they’ve left for various reasons.
Abby Grossberg was the producer for Maria Bartiromo’s Sunday show. From Dec. 2020 through Jan. 3, 2021, that show promoted the upcoming Jan. 6 day as the opportunity to overturn Biden’s electoral votes. (At Trump campaign's urging, she’s already revealed.) mediamatters.org/foxdominion-la…
Two possibilities:
a) Abby Grossberg realized in mid-November that Biden won the election, then she willfully participated in a coup effort based on what she knew to be lies.
b) Honestly more likely: She was a true believer, and she’s lying now about when she finally realized.
If anything, bad idea to publicly claim she knew by mid-November that Biden had won the election. Still a paper trail of her pushing election fraud claims (and talking up TV ratings on it) for weeks afterward!
She’d be way better off saying she drank the Kool-Aid the whole time.
Anderson Cooper interviewed Abby Grossberg last night, and unfortunately was no better at dealing with her personal revisionism than NBC’s kid gloves.
To start off, he asked her, “Did you buy into that?” instead of just showing the actual text messages that she bought into it.
Grossberg says, “I was definitely seduced for about a week by those ideas,” but then “it took a few days to kind of just realize that the whole thing was a ruse.”
The text messages above show that she went on this for weeks longer. (At least to Nov. 30, just what we’ve seen.)
Grossberg also told Anderson Cooper that she definitely had obligation to push back on Powell and Giuliani, but Maria Bartiromo never read those statements.
The texts show she bashed Fox anchor Eric Shawn for fact-checking Trump’s interview w/ Maria. (Also: “Sidney is right.”)
These text messages are all out in the open, thanks to Dominion’s evidence discovery. But both NBC and CNN have just totally neglected to check any of the receipts, before they welcomed this serial election denier on camera for a softball interview to rehabilitate her image.
Also, since CNN had the benefit of Grossberg’s softball interviews with NBC/MSNBC already being out there, they could’ve researched the evidence and called her out on the obvious falsehoods and contradictions. But they just didn’t.
Share this Scrolly Tale with your friends.
A Scrolly Tale is a new way to read Twitter threads with a more visually immersive experience.
Discover more beautiful Scrolly Tales like this.