Days after leaked footage showed ABC News’ Amy Robach venting about her story on Jeffrey Epstein not running on the network, a former ABC staffer has been fired from CBS News for their connection to the leak.
Multiple reports Thursday indicate that the former ABC staffer was fired, though CBS News did not reply to a request for comment from TheWrap.
On Wednesday night, journalist Yashar Ali tweeted, “ABC News execs believe they know who the former employee is who accessed footage of @arobach expressing her frustrations about her shelved Jeffrey Epstein story. That former employee is now at CBS and ABC execs have reached out to CBS News execs.”
By Thursday morning, Ali followed up with the update that he’d been told by “two sources familiar with the matter” that the staffer in question was fired. He noted it is not clear whether that staffer leaked the footage to right-wing group Project Veritas, or showed it to others who might have.
Project Veritas, the right-wing activist group that has tried to conduct previous sting operations to expose journalistic bias, released a video Tuesday of Robach saying she was “disappointed” that her 2015 story on Epstein didn’t run.
Project Veritas’ founder James O’Keefe tweeted the clip, captioning it, “BREAKING: @abcnews anchor @arobach caught on ‘hot mic’ in August disgustedly exposing networks decision to strategically spike bombshell investigation into Jefferey Esptein over THREE YEARS AGO. Says what she had was ‘unbelievable.’”
“As a journalist, as the Epstein story continued to unfold last summer, I was caught in a private moment of frustration,” Robach in a statement released Tuesday. “I was upset that an important interview I had conducted with Virginia Roberts didn’t air because we could not obtain sufficient corroborating evidence to meet ABC’s editorial standards about her allegations.”