The husband of one of the two moderators in next week’s CBS News debate featuring vice presidential candidates J.D. Vance and Tim Walz appears to have made two donations of $250 apiece to the controversial Lincoln Project during the 2020 election.
Records from the Federal Election Commission show that Ali “Yado” Yakub, the husband of Face the Nation host Margaret Brennan, contributed on July 2 and Sept. 26 of that year to the anti-Trump super-PAC.
Voting records confirmed that the address listed was the residence of Yakub, who was registered as a Republican, and Brennan, who was registered as an independent.
Many have observed that registration offers no indication about political preference, with Democrats during the recent primary—in which President Joe Biden ran largely uncontested—frequently changing their party identification to vote against Trump.
Yakub also made contributions to ActBlue in 2019, including two that were earmarked for the primary campaign of future Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg.
Headline USA reached out to both Brennan and Yakub by phone and email but received no response.
The Lincoln Project—founded by high-profile NeverTrump ex-Republicans Rick Wilson, George T. Conway III, Steve Schmidt, Reed Galen, John Weaver and Jennifer Horn—initially appeared to be a sort of principled response by members of the GOP establishment to Trump’s takeover of the party.
However, it quickly became clear that some of its members were growing increasingly unhinged with Trump Derangement Syndrome.
The group lost all credibility when, in January 2021, allegations emerged that co-founder John Weaver had engaged in sexual impropriety with young, male staffers and had allegedly solicited boys as young as 14.
The bombshell led to an exodus of the group’s more influential figures, such as former John McCain campaign chief Steve Schmidt, who had become a registered Democrat the month prior.
Only two of its charter members—Rick Wilson and Reed Galen—are currently associated with the group, which has grown more radical and outlandish, notoriously engaging in a stunt in which it staged a fake neo-Nazi rally and attempted to blame Trump supporters.
It also has run ads pushing blatant disinformation, such as attempting to suggest that Trump would monitor and arrest people for attempting to obtain an abortion. Trump has repeatedly emphasized that the issue is now at the state level and will remain so if he is re-elected, while noting that he personally favors exceptions for abortions in a set of specific, narrowly tailored circumstances.
Moreover, the Lincoln Project has sought to falsely tie Trump to the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, which he has repeatedly disavowed and denied any association with. The project launched in April 2023, well before Trump was the presumptive nominee, and was designed as a series of policy proposals for use by whichever candidate prevailed.
It is unclear whether Yakub’s donations would violate any CBS newsroom ethical policies, many of which would likely apply only to Brennan herself.
However, CBS News, like many mainstream media outlets, recently amplified attacks on Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito that suggested the conservative jurist should recuse himself from Trump-related cases due to his wife’s decision to display Revolutionary War-era flags that have been associated with Trump’s “Make America Great Again” movement.
Consequently, the network may have created at least the reasonable perception of bias by its own standard, particularly if Brennan’s moderation is believed to favor Walz over Vance in the Oct. 1 matchup.
The revelation of Brennan’s indirect ties to the Lincoln Project via Yakub comes amid lingering sensitivities about moderator bias following reports that ABC News may have colluded with the Kamala Harris campaign in the Sept. 10 presidential debate.
A whistleblower affidavit alleged that the network agreed to give Harris access to question topics, avoid certain questions and unilaterally “fact check” the statements—many of them verifiably true—of former President Donald Trump.
Breaking - Here is the ABC whistleblower affidavit stating how ABC arranged a bias, anti-Trump debate. There are several pages after the verification page that were specifics about the job the whistleblower did and a transcript of the recordings he had made. pic.twitter.com/JM9vvXbxok
— Thera (@Tamor12) September 15, 2024
The Senate has pledged to investigate the allegations.
“The American people deserve transparency and accountability from the mainstream media and full accounting of whether ABC News coordinated with the Harris campaign to skew the debate’s questions and fact-checking in favor of the Vice President,” Sen. Roger Marshall, R-Kansas, wrote in a letter to the network and the Harris campaign last week.
Like Disney-owned ABC, CBS’s top leadership has been revealed to be loaded with Democrat donors.
The network has been notorious for its bias in years past, prominently was the subject of Bernard Goldberg’s 2002 book Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News, reflecting on his 30-year career at the network.
Goldberg declined to speculate on the prospect of bias in the upcoming debate in a text-message to Headline USA.
“Predictions are hard — especially when they’re about the future,” he wrote. “Yogi [Berra] said that.”
He likewise deferred in commenting on the current level of bias at his old network.
“Been away from cbs news for a very long time and would have no valuable insight,” he wrote.
Another prominent CBS News alumna and well-known media-bias critic, Sharyl Attkisson, was slightly less reluctant.
“I don’t watch CBS and honestly have no idea about the culture! Almost everybody I knew is gone,” she told Headline USA via text message.
However, based on her continuing work in the field, she was able to venture her own belief that the ABC whistleblower was correct in saying corporate influences had impacted journalistic integrity over the past decade.
“I suspect you are correct,” she wrote. “There was a sea change in 2015 time period in which media fairness and accuracy devolved faster than any previous time I know of.”
Attkisson resigned in 2014 from the network and proceeded to write the best-selling book Stonewalled about her fight against “obstruction, intimidation and harassment” during the Obama era.
At the time, the president of CBS News was David Rhodes, who was the brother of leading Obama White House propagandist Ben Rhodes.
She has continued to chronicle the decline of American journalism in two series on her website: “Media Mistakes in the Era of Trump” and “Media Mistakes in the Era of Biden.”
Ben Sellers is the editor of Headline USA. Follow him at x.com/realbensellers.
