The reprimand of Chris Vlasto comes as ABC News’ investigative division is reeling from the suspension Saturday of chief investigative correspondent Brian Ross. | Spencer Platt/Getty Images
12/06/2017 06:27 PM EST
ABC News said it has reprimanded its top producer for investigative reporting for giving Donald Trump’s presidential campaign proprietary exit polling data on election night 2016.
In their new book “Let Trump Be Trump,” campaign insiders Corey Lewandowski and David Bossie wrote that Chris Vlasto — then-executive producer of “Good Morning America” and now senior executive producer for investigative reporting — called Bossie, Trump’s deputy campaign manager, at 5:01 p.m. on election night with information being shared within a consortium of The Associated Press and the major TV networks.
“Vlasto had the early exit numbers that the consortium of news networks — the Associated Press, ABC News, CBS News, CNN, Fox News, and NBC News — had collected,” Lewandowski and Bossie wrote. “The consortium followed eleven battleground states, including Ohio, Florida, and Pennsylvania. Trump was down in eight of the eleven states by five to eight points. The news was devastating. A kill shot.”
Two sources familiar with the consortium process told POLITICO that Vlasto should not have been providing such detailed information to people outside the group, which spends millions of dollars on exit polling and shares the information on Election Day. Representatives from the AP and TV networks crunch the numbers under strict quarantine until 5 p.m. on election night, at which time they can share the data with other members of their own organizations involved in coverage. News organizations involved in the consortium typically warn staffers not to provide specific exit-poll numbers to outsiders, especially given that the polls are still open.
“When we found out about this, we asked him about it,” an ABC News spokesperson told POLITICO. “He admitted it and was reprimanded.”
The reprimand of Vlasto comes as ABC News’ investigative division is reeling from the suspension Saturday of chief investigative correspondent Brian Ross. On Friday, Ross erroneously reported that Trump, during the campaign, instructed Michael Flynn to make contact with the Russians. Vlasto shifted to become ABC News’ senior executive producer for investigative reporting in June 2017 and was tasked with “setting the priorities for our investigative reporting by combining the forces of our powerhouse teams” in Washington and New York, the latter of which is co-led by Ross.
Bossie had known Vlasto for decades, going back to when Bossie was a Republican House investigator in the 1990s and Vlasto was covering the Clinton Whitewater investigations, according to the book. Vlasto was consideredfor a senior communications position in the Trump White House in the weeks after the election before pulling himself out of consideration.
In the book, Lewandowski and Bossie describe Bossie’s exchange with Vlasto on the 5:01 p.m. phone call:
“Are you sitting down?” Vlasto asked.
“Oh boy,” Dave said. “This can’t be good.”
“No, it’s not. You guys are in for a long night.”
Bossie, by his and Lewandowski’s account, wrote down the numbers provided by Vlasto and read them to Steve Bannon, Reince Priebus and Jared Kushner, the latter of whom called his father-in-law with the news. According to the book, Trump told his wife, Melania, that “Jared says we’re going to lose.”
Vlasto also sent an email to Bossie at 5:34 p.m. with exit poll data that Bossie had requested, according to the book. Bossie noted that some caveats to the consortium’s results may have signaled the news wasn’t all bad for Trump, according to the book.
He then told Bannon, Kushner and Priebus that he believed the “numbers are bad.”