Things got very entertaining on CNN as far-left Democrat Katie Porter, a gubernatorial candidate in California who has faced repeated and intense criticism for her horrible treatment of staffers, insisted that Republican Tom Steyer had leaked an embarrassing video of her abusing a staffer, something that appears to be untrue and which led to Dana Bash ending the interview so as to avoid defamation charges.
During the same interview, Porter had also gone off the rails by freaking out about another Democrat who is running in the race, Xavier Becerra, insisting that he poses a significant threat to Democrats in the state’s jungle primary, in which all candidates run against each other and the top two face off, regardless of party affiliation.
In any case, when speaking during the interview on CNN’s “Inside Politics” with Dana Bash, Porter insisted that a Republican competitor, Tom Steyer, had tried to “knock her down” by leaking a video of her behaving poorly, saying, “Well, given that Tom Steyer is the person who leaked the video with me and the staffer from five years ago, he pretty clearly wanted to be governor bad enough to knock me down to do it.”
Noting how absurd that comment was, and what it reflects about Porter and Porter’s views of behavior and politics, one poster on X said, “Katie Porter blames Tom Steyer for the leaked video of her abusing a staffer. LOL she doesn’t see anything wrong with her abusing her staffer, just that it was leaked.”
In any case, Bash then responded to Porter by effectively tossing her off the show and noting that what she said has to be treated as effectively untrue because it hasn’t been verified and Porter has shown no evidence for it. Ending the interview suddenly, she said, “I should note that we don’t have evidence that Steyer leaked that video of you. If you have it, please bring it.”
Steyer campaign spokesperson Sepi Esfahlani denied the accusation and hammered Porter for trying to distract from her own issues by trying to slander her opponents, saying, “Tom has nothing to do with that video. This is an attempt from Katie Porter to deflect from her past mistakes. Katie Porter only has one person to blame for her standing in the race, and it’s herself.”
Watch the moment here:
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Eric Bolling, commenting on the matter on his show on Real America’s Voice, said, “So basically, Dana Bash at CNN threw her out of the chair because she was making up stuff about her opponents. And by the way, those were Democrat opponents as well.”
During the interview, Porter also smeared Beccara, saying, “The simple fact is Secretary Becerra cannot promise Californians that he will not be named as a co-conspirator in this corruption charge. It was his campaign account, he signed off on it. It was his 25 year chief of staff who was receiving the money via this scheme. There’s just too much of a risk there for me, given the stakes of having the potential to have a Republican in charge of California. We have a top two primary. If Denver, if we make the wrong choice here, there is no right in process. You are stuck with the other top two candidates, which looks like it’s going to be Republican Steve Hilton. So, I do not think that is a risk Californians should be taking.”
Bash pressed her, “And just to be clear, he has said multiple times, including at CNN debate, that he did nothing wrong. Are you saying that you don’t believe that that’s true?” Porter said, “I do not have the facts here, but the people who are currently negotiating plea deals in Sacramento do. And if they implicate him, I have zero doubt that he will be indicted.”
Featured image credit: screengrab from the embedded video