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Well, this is awkward.
After Federal Election Commission filings showed that the Harris-Walz campaign paid a cool million to Oprah Winfrey’s Harpo Productions company for the town hall where Oprah endorsed Harris, Oprah denied it.
Caught on a backstreet by one of those TMZ video crews and asked if it was true that “they paid you a million dollars for the endorsement for Kamala”, Oprah replied, “Not true. I was paid nothing, ever.”
“The campaign paid for the production costs of ‘Unite for America,’ a live-streaming event that took place Sept. 19 outside Detroit, Mich.,” a spokesperson for Harpo said, trying to clear things up. “Oprah Winfrey was at no point during the campaign paid a personal fee, nor did she receive a fee from Harpo.”
Technically, that’s the truth. But only technically.
It was Winfrey’s production company that received the seven-figure check. But Harpo is owned by Winfrey. For all intents and purposes, Harpo IS Oprah.
The FEC paperwork shows that Harpo was paid for “EVENT PRODUCTION”, not for Winfrey’s endorsement. But does 94 minutes of unscripted, live television, produced on a small set, really cost a million dollars to produce? Or was Oprah’s “personal fee” just part of the overhead?
“As a legal matter”, the Federalist’s Sean Davis asked on Monday, “how are secret bought-and-paid-for endorsements even legal? If you can’t run a paid ad without a clear disclosure, how on earth can you run a paid endorsement without disclosure?”
Maybe that’s something the Trump DOJ should look into.
