Months after Democrats tried stuffing their humiliating 2024 election collapse into a locked drawer, the party finally coughed up its long-delayed “autopsy” of Kamala Harris’s failed White House bid — and the reaction from Fox News host Jessica Tarlov was absolutely brutal.
During Thursday’s episode of The Five, Tarlov tore into the Democratic National Committee’s long-hidden report, calling it a “piece of crap” riddled with missing sourcing, unsupported claims and glaring omissions about the real reasons voters handed Donald Trump another victory.
And the most embarrassing part for Democrats? Tarlov is one of the network’s resident liberals.
The report’s release came only after weeks of internal Democratic squabbling and pressure campaigns from party insiders furious that DNC Chair Ken Martin originally planned to bury the document altogether. According to reports, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro helped force the issue after confronting Martin over keeping the report under wraps.
Martin himself practically apologized while dumping the document into public view. “For full transparency, I am releasing the report as we received it, in its entirety, unedited and unabridged,” Martin said. “It does not meet my standards, and it won’t meet your standards, but I am doing this because people need to be able to trust the Democratic Party and trust our word.”
That disclaimer alone sounded less like a chairman introducing a serious political analysis and more like a guy warning neighbors before opening a biohazard container.
Tarlov argued Democrats only made the situation worse by hiding the report in the first place. “The time to look at it was a year ago, when it was available for release. They made it into a scandal when it wasn’t,” she said. “We’ve had a number of autopsies that have come out since the election, and they all say basically the same thing.”
“Because it’s a piece of crap,” Tarlov said when asked why the DNC delayed releasing it. “I mean, the fact we spent our money on this, the DNC dollars that could have gone to, you know, knocking on doors or whatever else, on an unfinished piece of shoddy work.”
She went on to hammer the report for lacking basic sourcing and documentation. “There were no citations,” Tarlov said. “It would be like, you know, X, Y, or Z happened, or this interview, and then no cites. You don’t know who said it. You don’t know how he came up with his numbers.”
According to Tarlov, Martin had to effectively fact-check his own party’s report in the margins. “So Ken Martin had to go in and redline the whole thing and say on the side, in the brackets — what’s it called — in the margins,” she explained. “He says, ‘No evidence for this, no evidence for this.’ So he didn’t release it because he’s embarrassed.” Hard to blame him.
The report was reportedly authored by longtime Democratic operative Paul Rivera, who Tarlov noted had remained comfortably attached to the DNC payroll until recently.
“It’s his long time friend, this guy Paul Rivera, who, by the way, was still on the DNC dole until today, basically,” she said. “So Ken Martin knew it was really bad, and he felt shame about it.”
But perhaps the biggest tell was what Democrats allegedly didn’t include. Tarlov pointed to the glaring lack of serious discussion surrounding Joe Biden’s obvious political liabilities heading into 2024 — particularly widespread concerns about his age, public appearances and the perception that aides were shielding him from scrutiny. “You are totally right about, you know, Biden was not included in this essentially,” she said. “Talk of him being too old, being shielded from the public — that is a central factor in why we ended up losing the 2024 election.”
That omission speaks volumes. Democrats spent years insisting voters weren’t seeing what was plainly in front of them, only to watch the issue explode into a political catastrophe after Biden’s disastrous debate performances and eventual withdrawal from the race. By the time Harris inherited the campaign, many voters had already concluded the party leadership had spent months gaslighting the public about Biden’s condition.
Now Democrats appear desperate to rewrite that history — or at least blur it enough to avoid accountability.
Tarlov wasn’t buying it. “We had this already,” she concluded. “I learned nothing in here except that they hired an inept person to do something that was deeply important.”
Democrat Rep. Jared Moskowitz: “An autopsy is a medical procedure you do over a corpse, and now it sounds like we need a malpractice attorney because we couldn’t even do the autopsy correctly.”
Yikes. https://t.co/mLCO48PYsJ pic.twitter.com/FaPO3qkmuC
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) May 21, 2026
