Donald Trump took aim at ABC News’ embattled star David Muir again over the journalist’s fact-checking during the presidential debate.
Speaking on the eve of his inauguration, the president-elect called out Muir after he contradicted Trump’s claim that violent crime has risen.
‘Do you remember I did the debate, and I had David Muir from ABC saying, “No, no crime has gone down”,’ Trump said of the September debate.
‘I said, “No, no, it’s gone through the roof.” Crime has gone through the roof. David [said] “no, no crime has gone down”. I said, “it’s gone through the roof”. And then he goes, “Uh, I disagree with that.”
‘The next day they announced that crime was up like 40 percent. This guy is, the whole thing is so bad.’
A revision of FBI figures the following month revealed that there was a 4.5 percent increase in violent crime between 2021 and 2022, equivalent to around 80,029 incidents, Fox reports.
‘President Trump, as you know, the FBI says overall violent crime is coming down in this country,’ Muir said at the time.
But yesterday the president-elect, who is due to be sworn in later today, hit back again.
Donald Trump took aim again at ABC News’ David Muir over the journalist’s fact-checking during the presidential debate
‘The FBI, they were defrauding statements,’ Trump said. ‘They didn’t include the worst cities. They didn’t include the cities with the worst crime. It was a fraud.’
Muir was a co-moderator of the debate alongside Linsey Davis.
Both were criticized by Trump immediately after the showdown against Kamala Harris after the president-elect claimed it was ‘one against three’.
‘David Muir of ABC, fake news, when I said that crime is way up in our country, he corrected me, he corrected me and so much and it was right what I said,’ Trump fumed.
‘He didn’t correct [Harris] one time, and what she said was wrong, absolutely wrong.
‘So many different— Charlottesville, she was wrong, all of the different things, almost everything she said, and she was never corrected.’
Muir, 53, recently hit headlines for an embarrassing gaffe while covering the California wildfires earlier this month.
The anchor was criticized for using pegs to cinch in the waist of a fire retardant jacket as he reported from the fire-ravaged landscape.
Muir previously challenged Trump’s claim that violent crime was up in the US which he made during the September presidential debate
The anchor was recently criticized for using pegs to cinch the waist of a fire retardant jacket while covering the California wildfires
Muir – known for posting photos of himself in skintight black t-shirts – was accused of cinching in his jacket to show off his impressive physique.
However, insiders at the network claimed that the ‘narcissistic’ behavior is typical behavior from Muir.
He is said to be embroiled in a long-term feud with fellow ABC News anchor George Stephanopoulos.
The two newsmen have been known to have tension and now are barely seen on screen together as a result, as revealed by Oliver Darcy in a holiday edition of the Status newsletter.
‘There certainly has been historic tension — to put it lightly — between the two anchors,’ Darcy wrote in response to a question about the dynamic between Muir and Stephanopoulos.
Stephanopoulos brought scandal to ABC News just last month when the network was forced to pay $15 million to settle a defamation suit filed by Donald Trump.
While hosting This Week last March, Stephanpoulos said Trump had been ‘found liable for rape’ in a civil lawsuit brought by writer E. Jean Carroll.
A jury had actually found Trump liable for the sexual abuse of Carroll over a 1996 incident in a dressing room of NYC department store Bergdorf Goodman.
Insiders at ABC News are said to have settled amid fears Stephanopoulos’ embarrassing text messages and emails would be made public should the matter go to trial.
He remains employed by the network.
