On Wednesday morning, Frank Ferrenkov received a letter from the Biden presidential campaign that ruined his day.

Ferrenkov is co-chair of the Commission on Presidential Debates, which has produced 33 debates since 1988,

the first year it was in business. He was planning on four more this year, three with Biden and

Trump, and perhaps a third party candidate if they qualified,

as well as the quadrennial vice presidential debate.

But the Biden campaign told Ferrenkoff that the president would not be participating.

It said the Commission's debates were too late in the year, after many Americans had already

voted early, that the debates had become noisy spectacles, and the Biden campaign

complained that in 2020 the Commission didn't enforce its own debate rules.

Instead, the Biden campaign announced that it would negotiate with the Trump campaign and individual media

organizations to plan two debates outside of the Commission's process.

By the end of the day, Biden and Trump were set to debate in June on CNN and in September on ABC.

That left the future of the Commission on Presidential Debates very much in doubt. I went out to

Ferrenkov's house in Virginia to talk to him about all of this. We sat at his

dining room table and he took me through a slide deck about the Commission and its history. You may hear some papers rustling.

And he had a lot to say about Biden, Trump, Anita Dunn, Rudy Giuliani, good and bad debate moderators, why he thinks RFK Jr may have grounds for a lawsuit

against CNN.

Some amazing behind-the-scenes stories from his decades producing debates,

and why he believes the Commission

ain't dead yet.

I'm Ryan Liza, and this is Playbook Deep Dive. All right, so Frank, you've got a little handout for me here. Tell me about this.

It's a set of slides that explains what the CPD is, how we came into being, what's the history behind it, what modifications have we made over the years

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