by Phill Kline
As Director of The Amistad Project, I have spent years examining how private money, political influence, and nonprofit networks intersect with election administration. That work has repeatedly brought me into direct contact with evidence that the infusion of private funds into the 2020 election was not a neutral act of civic charity but a targeted intervention designed to benefit one candidate—Mr. Biden.
Yet throughout this period, major media outlets insisted there was “no evidence” of such influence, and when the factual record became too substantial to ignore, they shifted to the equally misleading claim that there was “no proof.”
This rhetorical maneuver—first denying the existence of evidence, then redefining the standard so that evidence no longer counts—mirrors the same pattern we now see in ABC News’ coverage of Iran, where the newsroom’s political desk claims there is “no evidence” Iranians desire regime change even as ABC’s own foreign correspondents have documented mass dissent, executions, and nationwide uprisings.
The problem is not the absence of evidence. The problem is the newsroom’s selective definition of what evidence is allowed to count when it comes to all things Trump.
My own experience with the 2020 election illustrates this dual standard with painful clarity. In the course of our investigations, we uncovered substantial evidence that the flow of private funds into election offices was not merely coincidental but strategically designed to benefit Mr. Biden.
This evidence was not speculative. It included the documented fact that in 2007, John Podesta requested and received millions of dollars from George Soros and others to route through nonprofits in support of President Obama’s reelection efforts.
It included the fact that David Plouffe, Obama’s former campaign manager, was recommended to Mark Zuckerberg as someone who could run Zuckerberg’s charitable foundation. It included the fact that Plouffe had just authored A Citizen’s Guide to Defeating Donald Trump, a book that argued the 2020 election would be won through a block-by-block turnout operation in cities like Milwaukee, Detroit, Philadelphia, and Atlanta.
And it included the fact that soon after Plouffe joined Zuckerberg’s orbit, more than $400 million in private funds were injected into the 2020 election under the banner of “safe elections,” with the overwhelming majority of those funds directed precisely to the urban centers Plouffe had identified as decisive.
These facts were not hidden. They were documented in grant agreements, public records, and the operational plans of the nonprofits involved.
Yet the media insisted there was “no evidence.” When that position became untenable, they shifted to “no proof,” as though proof—something that emerges only after investigation—were a prerequisite for investigation itself.
This is the same epistemic sleight of hand we now see in ABC’s Iran coverage. ABC’s foreign desk has reported, in vivid detail, that Iranians have openly called for regime change, that thousands have been killed in protests, that the regime has executed dissidents and athletes, and that the country has experienced its largest anti-government uprising since 1979.
Yet ABC’s political desk, operating under a different evidentiary standard, declares there is “no evidence” Iranians desire regime change because there is no polling, no public statements, and no institutional data—forms of evidence that cannot exist in a dictatorship. The newsroom’s evidentiary framework, not the facts on the ground, determines what counts as real.
This selective skepticism becomes even more striking when one considers the speculative nature of the political-desk stories themselves. In the Trump article, ABC freely engages in inference, projecting potential violations of international law, interpreting motives, and extrapolating future actions based on expert commentary.
None of this is “evidence” in the narrow empirical sense. It is analysis and prediction—forms of reasoning the political desk is perfectly comfortable using when evaluating American political actors, especially Trump. Yet when the subject shifts to Iranian public sentiment, the same reporter abruptly abandons inference and demands empirical proof that is impossible to obtain under an authoritarian regime.
The newsroom is willing to speculate about what Trump might do, but refuses to infer what Iranians might want, even when its own foreign correspondents have already documented the answer.
This is not a principled application of skepticism; it is a selective one.
The result is a manufactured absence of evidence. It is the same pattern I saw in 2020: evidence exists, but the newsroom adopts a standard that excludes it; the newsroom declares the evidence nonexistent; and when the evidence becomes too visible to deny, the newsroom shifts the standard again.
This is not deception in the conspiratorial sense, but it is deception in the institutional sense—the kind produced by incentives, risk aversion, and epistemic habits. It is the kind of deception that allows a reporter to stand outside a house on a hot July day, knowing the occupant is suspected of bank fraud, knowing the documents proving the fraud are inside, and watching smoke begin to pour from the chimney while the occupant blocks the door. Any reasonable person would recognize that as evidence—not proof, but evidence—that the documents are being destroyed. Yet under the media’s selectively narrow definition, even this would be dismissed as “no evidence.”
A free press has the right to skepticism, but it does not have the moral right to redefine evidence in ways that obscure reality. When ABC reports mass dissent in Iran, it cannot credibly claim there is “no evidence” of anti-regime sentiment. When newsrooms document the targeted flow of private funds into election administration, they cannot credibly claim there is “no evidence” of disparate treatment.
The public is not confused. The public sees the evidence—and sees the press refusing to acknowledge it. The crisis is not one of information but of epistemic integrity. If journalism is to recover trust, it must abandon the rhetorical convenience of “no evidence” and return to the harder, humbler work of describing the world as it is, even when the evidence is uncomfortable, incomplete, or institutionally inconvenient.
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Phill Kline is the former Kansas attorney general. He is now a law school professor and director of the Amistad Project.
