The senior executive producer for investigative reporting at ABC News has been reprimanded sharing confidential polling data with the 2016 Donald Trump presidential campaign.
Chris Vlasto was the executive producer of "Good Morning America" when he called Trump deputy campaign manager David Bossie on election day. Bossie detailed the leak in his new "Let Trump Be Trump" book written with one-time campaign manager Corey Lewandowski.
“Vlasto had the early exit numbers that the consortium of news networks — the Associated Press, ABC News, CBS News, CNN, Fox News, and NBC News — had collected,” Lewandowski and Bossie wrote. “The consortium followed eleven battleground states, including Ohio, Florida, and Pennsylvania. Trump was down in eight of the eleven states by five to eight points. The news was devastating. A kill shot.”
The data had cost the consortium millions of dollars to produce.
“When we found out about this, we asked him about it,” an ABC News spokesperson told POLITICO. “He admitted it and was reprimanded.”
Vlasto was in the running to be Trump's initial White House Communications Director, but took his name out of consideration after Politico reported on his meetings at Trump Tower with senior transition staff.
(Correction: A previous version of this story incorrectly represented a man as Chris Vlasto who was not Chris Vlasto. We regret the error.)
