Rudy Giuliani claimed in a recent deposition that the Trump campaign essentially had veto power over One America News reporter Christina Bobb’s stories while she volunteered for the Trump legal team following the 2020 presidential election.
In a defamation lawsuit filed by former Dominion executive Eric Coomer against former President Donald Trump and several of his election-denying allies, including Giuliani and OAN, the former New York City mayor discussed the “agreement” he reached with OAN president Charles Herring to have Bobb work on the campaign’s legal team.
“And my staff said she was terrific, she was very trustworthy and if we could work out an agreement with One America News, it would be very helpful,” Giuliani said in the deposition which was taken in August. “She was a very good investigator. So I didn't act on it right away. I wanted to see how she functioned and she was fabulous. She would get you information quickly, she turned out to be an excellent lawyer, she could write really well.”
ADVERTISEMENT
As the Daily Beast reported back in November, Bobb—who hosts a weekly show on OAN—was added to Trump’s legal efforts to overturn the election and aid the so-called “elite strike force” team that was fronted by Giuliani and conspiracy-peddling pro-Trump lawyer Sidney Powell. Campaign staffers were initially confused by her presence, wondering among themselves if she was embedded as a journalist.
“I talked to Charles [Herring] myself and I said if she has to hold this confidential from you, that doesn't mean general assignment—they would take her off,” Giuliani added in the deposition.
The former Trump lawyer then claimed that the arrangement he had with Herring allowed the campaign to have the final say on any reporting she did during that time.
“Yes, the rules that we made with Charles were that he would defer to us to whatever our needs were, that he couldn't give it to us permanently but he could loosen up her assignments for the next couple of months,” Giuliani said. “Therefore she wouldn't be working all that much for OAN, so the conflict thing wouldn't come up all the time, that she would agree that any there won't be things that you can then if they are okay then the benefit to you is you'll have like an extra, you'll have an extra edge on everybody else that will benefit you, but you're going to have to agree to something that I know our news networks won't agree to, which is there may be things that you just can't do and she's got to separate her role as a lawyer and if she wants to share things with you, she will have to get my permission or one of my people.”
Later on in the deposition, Giuliani made that point even more abundantly clear.
“They said they would take her off communication she had, OAN would be treated for that purpose the way any other news organization is, and then if she did develop a discrete, good story, she would have to run it past us so it didn't violate any of our rules or whatever,” he declared.
“And I was pretty comfortable they would live by it because they had before. And I knew she had tremendous enthusiasm for doing this and I always like to hire people with enthusiasm because they work harder.”
Herring did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Bobb not only worked directly for the Trump campaign in its efforts to overthrow President Joe Biden’s election victory but she’s also used her OAN airtime since to fundraise for the bogus right-wing election “audits” that seek to undermine credibility in last year’s election results, appealing directly to the network’s viewers to donate to her non-profit group.
Coomer’s lawsuit, which focuses on Trump and his allies baselessly accusing the ex-Dominion employee of using voting machines to flip millions of votes at the behest of George Soros and Venezuela, also recently uncovered an internal Trump memo that concluded these theories were false. The memo was prepared on Nov. 13, six days before Giuliani’s and Powell’s infamous press conference in which they claimed voting software rigged the election.
