Debate commission co-chair blames Dunn, Klain for Biden campaign decision

The co-chair of the Commission on Presidential Debates blamed two top Biden advisers for his campaign’s decision to forgo the traditional debates and have two earlier battles with former President Trump instead.

Anita Dunn, a Biden administration adviser, and Ron Klain, the former White House chief of staff, are responsible for the campaign’s decision, said Frank Fahrenkopf, who served as chair of the Republican National Committee at the time the two major parties agreed to create a bipartisan commission on debates in the late 1980s.

“There was no question” that the letter that the Biden campaign sent to the commission was a result of Dunn and Klain, Fahrenkopf said in an interview with Politico.

Klain has represented Democratic presidential nominees coordinating with the commission since 2000. 

President Biden’s campaign chair, Jen O’Malley Dillon, notified the commission in a letter on Wednesday that it planned to work directly with news organizations to arrange debates between Biden and former President Trump. 

“As Donald Trump has said he will debate ‘anytime, anywhere,’ we hope both campaigns can quickly accept broadcast media debate invitations on the parameters above,” she said in the letter. “Americans need a debate on the issues – not a tedious debate about debates.” 

Trump quickly responded that he would accept the terms that the Biden campaign proposed for debates to be held in June and September. CNN announced that it would host the first one, and ABC soon after announced it would host the second one. 

The move essentially sidelined the commission, which has organized presidential debates since 1988 and had already announced dates for three presidential debates and one vice presidential debate in the fall. 

“I know where all this is coming [from] — this is Anita Dunn,” Fahrenkopf told Politico. “This is her plan. I know. She’s fought — she was against the commission for years and years and years.” 

He pointed to Dunn and Klain’s involvement in a 2015 report from the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania that advocated for reforms to the debate process, saying Dunn “hates us and always has.” 

Fahrenkopf also pushed back against three criticisms that the Biden campaign cited as reasons for going around the commission for planning debates. 

The letter from O’Malley Dillon argued that the debates were scheduled too late in the year because early voting would have already started, that they have become “noisy spectacles” filled with “disruptive partisans and donors” and that the commission was “unwilling or unable” to enforce its rules as Trump repeatedly interrupted Biden during one debate in 2020. 

Fahrenkopf said the commission decided that the debates needed to take place after Sept. 6 because not all states will finalize their ballots until then. One key qualification for determining candidate eligibility is being on enough ballots that a candidate could reach the required 270 electoral votes to win the race. 

Only a handful of states will have finalized their ballots by the time of the first debate next month. 

Fahrenkopf said the accusation of the debates becoming “noisy spectacles” is false. 

“And they know it’s false,” he said. “I mean, they were there last time. There’s no cheering that goes on.” 

In response to the criticism that the commission did not do enough to control Trump during the infamous 2020 debate, Fahrenkopf questioned what moderator Chris Wallace or anyone else could have done. 

“What were we going to do?” he said. “Was I going to jump up on the stage? Chris did everything he could to say, ‘You're not obeying the rules. You’re breaking your own rules.’ So I don't know what we could have done.” 

Klain told Politico that he still stood by the criticism of how the commission had run the debates, saying the fact that millions of Americans vote before the first debate is “indisputable.” He said the debates are “giant with huge crowds of donors to the hosting college and the CPD corporate sponsors. That is also an indisputable fact.” 

Dunn declined to comment to Politico. 

But Fahrenkopf also said the Biden campaign’s choice was a smart strategy, arguing that Biden got the upper hand from these developments. He said he read an analysis he agreed with that it “could end up being one of the great blunders of the entire election cycle” for Trump.