ABC anchor caught on hot mic complaining about how network killed her Epstein story

ABC News anchor Amy Robach was caught on a hot mic complaining that the network shelved her story about Jeffrey Epstein three years ago.

• The a video of Robach was released by conservative activist James O’Keefe and his Project Veritas.
• O’Keefe says the video was leaked by a “brave” ABC News insider and was recorded in August.
• In the tape, Robach is heard talking about how she had recorded an interview with Epstein accuser Virginia Roberts Giuffre years ago.
• “I tried for three years to get it on to no avail and now it’s all coming out and it’s like these new revelations and I freaking had all of it. I’m so pissed right now,” Robach says.
• She also goes on to mention that Giuffre’s allegations against Prince Andrew made the network nervous it wouldn’t be able to score interviews with members of the royal family if it aired the story.
• The recording appears to have come right around the time that NPR reported separately that ABC and other media outlets had squashed the story.

ABC News responded with this statement to Mediaite:

At the time, not all of our reporting met our standards to air, but we have never stopped investigating the story. Ever since we’ve had a team on this investigation and substantial resources dedicated to it. That work has led to a two-hour documentary and 6-part podcast that will air in the new year.

Meanwhile, Robach issued a separate statement:

As a journalist, as the Epstein story continued to unfold last summer, I was caught in a private moment of frustration. I was upset that an important interview I had conducted with Virginia Roberts didn’t air because we could not obtain sufficient corroborating evidence to meet ABC’s editorial standards about her allegations. My comments about Prince Andrew and her allegation that she had seen Bill Clinton on Epstein’s private island were in reference to what Virginia Roberts said in that interview in 2015. I was referencing her allegations – not what ABC News had verified through our reporting. The interview itself, while I was disappointed it didn’t air, didn’t meet our standards. In the years since no one ever told me or the team to stop reporting on Jeffrey Epstein, and we have continued to aggressively pursue this important story.

The edited version of the Robach clip is available below. However, the publisher of the video, Project Veritas, has been known to deceptively edit video and insert commentary into its clips, so it’s not immediately clear if this is the full clip or how, if at all, it may have been edited.