President Trump’s re-election campaign on Monday said that the Commission on Presidential Debates is attempting to change the focus of this week’s final forum to benefit Democratic candidate Joe Biden.
Trump campaign adviser Jason Miller told reporters on a conference call that the final debate — this Thursday in Nashville — was supposed to be about foreign policy, but that the commission is attempting to broaden the topics discussed.
“They’re putting their foot on the scale with regard to this third debate. This was supposed to be the foreign policy debate,” Miller said.
“The debate commission is now trying to change the rules to make this not a whole host of different issues and we believe this is the request of the Biden campaign, which does not want to talk about Joe Biden’s support for endless wars, his support for sending pallets of cash to Iran, the fact that Joe Biden appears to be compromised by the Chinese Communist Party, as we look at this money coming in to Hunter.”
Miller invoked The Post’s reporting last week on a Hunter Biden hard drive that indicates the former vice president was involved in his son’s business dealings in China and Ukraine, despite the elder Biden’s past denials.
“There are dinosaurs and then there are swamp dinosaurs, which I guess the commission would be,” Miller said.
“The Joe Biden camp does not want to talk foreign policy. It is clear that the debate commission is bending over backwards, trying to help the Biden campaign … They’re trying to move the goal posts just like they always do.”
The Trump campaign later wrote to the commission asking that they stick to the foreign policy format.
“We write with great concern over the announced topics for what was always billed as the “Foreign Policy Debate” in the series of events agreed to by both the Trump campaign and Biden campaign many months ago,” wrote Trump campaign manager Bill Stepien. “The topics announced by moderator Kristen Welker (Fighting COVID-19, American Families, Race in America, Climate Change, National Security, and Leadership) are serious and worthy of discussion, but only a few of them even touch on foreign policy.
“We understand that Joe Biden is desperate to avoid conversations about his own foreign policy record … New information recently revealed indicates that Biden himself was mentioned as a financial beneficiary of a deal arranged by his son Hunter and a communist Chinese-related energy company,” Stepien continued referring to The Post’s expose last week.
“If a major party candidate for President of the United States is compromised by the Communist Party of China, this is something Americans deserve to hear about, but it is not surprising the Biden would want to avoid it. It is completely irresponsible for the Commission to alter the focus of this final debate just days before the event, solely to insulate Biden from his own history.”
The commission and Biden’s campaign did not immediately respond to a requests for comment.
The Nashville debate was supposed to be the third and final clash of the election, but the commission canceled a scheduled second debate this month in Miami following President Trump’s diagnosis with COVID-19. The commission insisted on a virtual debate, but Trump, whose doctor ultimately cleared him for travel days ahead of the debate, refused.
Trump has trashed the bipartisan commission as biased against him. He recently retweeted the former GOP senator and 1996 Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole, who wrote that he knows “all of the Republicans and most are friends of mine” on the commission, but that he’s “concerned that none of them support [Trump].”
Miller said there’s also concern about a possible change allowing mic feeds to be cut in Nashville.
“We’re also hearing the debate commission might try to change the rules, once again, to try to have one of these rigged workers, somewhere in the control truck be able to turn off the president’s microphone whenever they want to, which again would be a gross violation of what we agreed to initially,” he said.
Trump is likely to hammer Biden on his son’s international business dealings and documents indicating he was involved, Miller said.
“Either way, President Trump is very confident about this Thursday, he looks forward to any opportunity to answer these questions about being the ‘chairman’, or the ‘big guy’, or what kind of cash that they’ve brought in from these foreign entities, as well as hearing Joe Biden talk about his support for endless wars,” he said.