Former RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel off to a rocky start at NBC

Former Republican National Committee Chairman Ronna McDaniel is off to a rocky start with her new job as an analyst at NBC News and its sister cable network MSNBC.

After a rather hostile interview from “Meet the Press” host Kristen Welker, in which McDaniel was repeatedly questioned on her past loyalty to former President Donald Trump on issues such as his comments about pardoning some of the January 6 prisoners if he is reelected president, and his efforts to challenge election results in states where there were election irregularities, some of the network’s prominent voices raised objections to her presence on the NBC team.

NBC News chief political analyst Chuck Todd, who was the previous host of “Meet the Press” for nine years, appeared on a panel immediately after McDaniel’s interview was over.

“Let me deal with the elephant in the room,” Todd began.

“I think our bosses owe you an apology for putting you in this situation. Because I don’t know what to believe,” Todd told Welker. “She is now a paid contributor by NBC News, so I have no idea whether any answer she gave to you was because she didn’t want to mess up her contract.”

Todd said McDaniel has “credibility issues” and outlined simmering tensions among journalists at the network over the hiring.

“There’s a reason why there are a lot of journalists at NBC News uncomfortable with this, because many of our professional dealings with the RNC over the last six years have been met with gaslighting, have been met with character assassination,” he said.

“So when NBC made the decision to give her NBC News’s credibility, you got to ask yourself, ‘What does she bring NBC News?’” he added.

Were these questions raised when NBC hired Jen Psaki, right after being the White House press secretary for President Joe Biden? Probably not.

Todd’s comments followed NBC News’s internal announcement Friday that it had hired McDaniel as a contributor, according to The Wall Street Journal.  In that announcement, the NBC political chief, Carrie Budoff Brown, said McDaniel would contribute “across all NBC News platforms,” which the Journal reported is “causing turmoil among several of the network’s on-air hosts and staffers.”

MSNBC’s president, Rashida Jones, has been trying to address internal backlash from Friday’s announcement, the Journal reports. She told employees that there are no plans to have McDaniel on MSNBC, after a number of the anchors and producers voiced their concerns about her ties to Trump and the RNC’s role in working with Trump to challenge the 2020 election results.

In the announcement of her hiring, Brown wrote, “It couldn’t be a more important moment to have a voice like Ronna’s on the team…As we gear up for the longest general election season in recent memory, she will support our leading coverage by providing an insider’s perspective on national politics and on the future of the Republican Party—which she led through some of the most turbulent and challenging moments in political history.”