Donald Trump and Surrogates Heap Blame on Debate Moderator Lester Holt's Line of Questioning

Trump and running mate Pence are pointing fingers at NBC anchor Lester Holt.

ByABC News
September 27, 2016, 11:28 AM

— -- Donald Trump and his team are slamming presidential debate moderator Lester Holt for not asking Hillary Clinton questions Monday night about her email controversy and possible conflicts of interest concerning the Clinton Foundation, among other things.

“He didn’t ask her about the emails at all,” Trump told “Fox &Friends” this morning. “He didn’t ask her about her scandals. He didn’t ask her about the Benghazi [Libya] deal that she destroyed. He didn’t ask her about a lot of things that she should have been asked about. There’s no question about it.”

Trump also said Holt, the anchor of NBC’s “Nightly News,” leaned “more than a little” to the left. “Lester should have brought up the emails,” Trump said when asked why he thought Holt didn’t stress the private server controversy. “That should have been a question.”

Trump gave Holt a “C” or “C plus” when asked to grade his performance. “I thought he was OK,” Trump said. “I thought he was fine. Nothing outstanding. I thought he gave me very unfair questions at the end, the last three, four questions. But I’m not complaining about that. I thought he was OK.”

Vice presidential candidate Mike Pence also criticized Holt’s questioning during the debate.

“I was disappointed that Lester did not get into some of the issues that have been so much in the forefront of Hillary Clinton’s candidacy,” Pence said on ABC News’ “Good Morning America” today.

“The FBI investigation, Clinton Foundation, pay to play, the whole disastrous events that took place in Benghazi and Libya — that never came up.”

But top Clinton aide John Podesta said the Trump camp should stop criticizing the questions. “Look, we have a kind of rule in our campaign: When you are complaining about the moderator, you are losing,” he said on Fox this morning.

“I think that the Trump side shouldn’t do it either,” he added. “I think on, balance, it was fair.”

Top Trump supporter Rudy Giuliani also hit Holt this morning for saying Monday night that the stop-and-frisk policing tactic was unconstitutional.

“I watched Lester Holt do Candy Crowley at least twice,” said Giuliani, a former mayor of New York, referring to her controversial fact-check of Mitt Romney during a 2012 presidential debate.

“The moderator didn’t do his homework, and the moderator is wrong about [stop and frisk],” Giuliani said today on “Fox & Friends.” “A hundred million people last night were misled by Lester Holt.”

In fact, a federal judge ruled stop and frisk unconstitutional in 2013, and the city later dropped its appeal of the ruling.

Giuliani said Monday night that if he were Trump, he would consider skipping the remaining two debates because of what he called unfair moderating.

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