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Terry McAuliffe Lies His Way Through Sunday's 'Meet the Press' Interview

Rebecca Downs
Rebecca Downs  |  October 31, 2021 3:45 PM

Update:

Terry McAuliffe did not merely lie about education during Sunday's interview on "Meet the Press." McAuliffe's Republican opponent, Glenn Youngkin, released a list of 15 lies that the Democrat told, also to do with the pandemic, vaccines, and book banning. 

Original:

On Sunday's edition of "Meet the Press," two days before Election Day in Virginia, Democratic gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe was not entirely truthful in his interview, especially when it comes to education. 

In one of his first answers, McAuliffe talked up the "great school system in Virginia," going on to say that he and his wife, Dorothy, "have raised our five children." For how "great" he considers it to be, though, it turns out that McAuliffe put four of his five children through private school. 

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Spencer exposed last month that Dorothy McAuliffe was the chair of the board of trustees for their children's private school. As he wrote:

The McAuliffes, it turns out, sent their children to the private Potomac School in McLean, Virginia, outside of Washington, D.C., and the candidate's wife Dorothy McAuliffe served as chair of the board of trustees for the school while their children were students. 

An annual report published by the Potomac School in 2008 and obtained by Townhall includes a letter from trustee board chair Dorothy McAuliffe and later lists the family as having students in second grade, seventh grade, and tenth grade.

Current tuition at the Potomac School runs from $39,150 for kindergarten through third grade to $45,650 for ninth through twelfth grade. While there's nothing wrong with a family pursuing the best possible education for their children, it does become problematic when a member of that family runs on a record of vetoing school choice bills and a platform of denying parents the right to influence the education given to their children. That's exactly what Terry and Dorothy McAuliffe have done. 

McAuliffe not only doubled down on the shocking admission made during the second debate last month, that "I don't think that parents should be telling schools what they should teach", but also when it comes to a series of bills he vetoed to do with education.

As Elizabeth Tyree wrote for local news outlet WSET in March 2017, McAuliffe vetoed six bills on education. 

One of them was House Bill 2191, which would require schools to notify parents if their child is enrolled in a course in which the instructional materials or related academic activities include sexually explicit content or the potential for sexually explicit content. It would also have required teachers to provide alternative instructional materials if requested by a parent. 

Todd had asked "do you feel as if everything you said there should reassure parents that they have some say in their kids' schooling?" McAuliffe arguably did not answer that one. 

Further, this doubling down is an odd tactic, as McAuliffe had claimed earlier this month in a television ad that his Republican opponent, Glenn Youngkin, was taking his words out of context by repeatedly criticizing McAuliffe for such a response. 

Youngkin responded with proof that he was not taking it out of context, however. Even CNN's Chris Cillizza warned that the response was not the right approach. 

Predictably, Critical Race Theory (CRT) also came up, and just as predictable was that McAuliffe used the same exact lines he's been using throughout the campaign, which is that it's "a racist dog whistle" and has "never been taught in Virginia."

As Andrew Mark Miller reported on Saturday night for Fox News, though, the Virginia Department of Education website promotes CRT by name. 

While McAuliffe weighed in on the issue of school boards, he blamed the "ruckus" on Youngkin and never acknowledged the genuine concerns of parents, not even the rape incidents occurring in the Loudoun County School District. 

In response to Youngkin earlier this month calling for an investigation of the Loudoun County School Board, Christian Freundlich, a McAuliffe spokesperson, in a statement to Julia Manchester with The Hill, claimed that "Glenn Youngkin's entire campaign has been based on Donald Trump's divisive conspiracy theories, and tonight we saw more of the same--angry Trumpian conspiracy theories and constant threats against public school funding."

It's also worth highlighting and calling out the fact that Georgia's Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger made an appearance on the Sunday show, though Todd did not ask him to comment on the Virginia election. 

Raffensperger has written about his concerns to do with the election before in a piece for RealClearPolitics, specifically when it comes to how McAuliffe and failed Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams are spreading lies about the 2018 election Abrams lost.