Leftist Co-Host Apologizes For Spreading Claims Against Ron DeSantis: ‘I Screwed Up Royally’

Ana Kasparian Producer of the Young Turks on SiriusXM Business News in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on July 27, 2016. Donald Kravitz/Getty Images for SiriusXM

Ana Kasparian, co-host of “The Young Turks,” apologized to her audience for providing air time to a Democratic activist and critic of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ COVID-19 policies.

“The only person that should be held responsible for that is me. I’m the executive producer of the show and I screwed up royally,” Kasparian said via the “Young Turks” YouTube channel, referring to her prior coverage of former Florida health official Rebekah Jones, who had made a number of accusations against the Republican governor.

“I want to correct all of those errors that we had previously reported,” Kasparian said overnight Tuesday, referring to claims that Jones made. “And I want to be clear that out of everyone who works on the main show, the only person who should be held responsible for that is me. I’m the executive producer of the show and I screwed up royally, and part of the reason why I screwed up is because I had all these biases, of course, against Ron DeSantis. And I don’t really feel bad about that because I think Ron DeSantis has done some pretty terrible things in the state of Florida, but it becomes a problem when that bias blinds you to what the facts of various stories happen to be.”

Kasparian added: “I should have done my due diligence, I failed to do so, and by failing to do so, I feel like I misled the audience into thinking that Rebekah Jones is some sort of hero.”

The left-leaning pundit also expressed concerns that some of her audience may have donated to Jones due to its coverage of her claims. Through a number of online fundraisers, Jones has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars.

In response to Kasparian’s statement on YouTube, Jones told The Epoch Times Wednesday that she is going to do “a total debunk of that shameful piece today and tomorrow, actually.” She added: “I expect another retraction in the coming week. I’m surprised TYT would allow a reporter to engage in spreading defamatory disinformation.”

Jones was charged with illegally accessing state computers after she publicly accused officials of wanting to make COVID-19 statistics look less dire and has reached an agreement with prosecutors that should result in the case being dropped. Investigators say that in late 2020, months after she was fired, Jones illegally accessed a state emergency-alert messaging system known as ReadyOp.

The Florida Department of Law Enforcement said Jones downloaded and saved confidential data and sent a message to 1,750 state employees regarding the number of Floridians who had died of COVID-19 by that point, according to The Associated Press. She also accused DeSantis of firing her for refusing to falsify case numbers, although a state inspector general report released months ago found no evidence of wrongdoing on behalf of the Florida Department of Health.

Rebekah Jones during an interview with CNN on June 24. Courtesy of CNN

And last year, Jones signed a plea deal admitting guilt and she agreed to pay $20,000 for a pending criminal case. She was accused of accessing a state health department computer system without authorization.

However, Jones said via her YouTube channel at the time that “there was no guilty plea. There was no plea of any kind because it was a dismissal. The case is being dropped.” Later, she said she signed the agreement because she wants to go back to school for her Ph.D.

“The Young Turks,” described as a left-wing or progressive news commentary show on YouTube, wasn’t the only news outlet to feature claims made by Jones. A number of corporate media outlets covered claims she made against DeSantis in 2020, making a number of appearances on CNN programs.

But Kasparian stated this week that she regretted elevating Jones’s claims and wanted to “avoid helping someone who might be a grifter from fundraising off of our own audience members.”

Jones ran for Congress last year as a Democrat in a bid to unseat Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) in his heavily Republican Northwest Florida district. Gaetz handily won reelection with 68 percent of the vote.