It's not just Republicans who think the ABC News debate between former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris was "rigged."

A top former advisor to both Bill and Hillary Clinton--a Democrat, obviously--said Thursday that ABC News should be investigated over the extremely biased debate.

Mark Penn said on the John Solomon Reports podcast that the internal communications between ABC News employees involved in the debate should be looked at to see if it was a preplanned and intentional effort aimed at "rigging the outcome of this debate."

"I actually think they should do a full internal investigation, hire an outside law firm. I don't know how much of this was planned in advance," Penn said.

Preplanned coordination

Penn suggested that the network could have coordinated with Harris to influence the outcome.

"I don't know what they told the Harris campaign. I think the day after, suspicion here is really quite high, and I think a review of all their internal texts and emails really should be done by an independent party to find out to what extent they were planning on, in effect, you know, fact-checking just one candidate and in effect, rigging the outcome of this debate. I think the situation demands nothing less than that," he added.

Penn, who chairs the Harvard CAPS Harris poll, was critical of the press coverage of the two candidates.

"It's a 50-50, race. He's [Trump] got more obvious tools to get across the finish line than she does and part of the thing here is that if the referees have their finger on the scale, it's harder to, you know, break through and overcome. And certainly, general media coverage has been fairly laughable," he said.

Penn thought that a good tactic for Trump would be to mail out to every voter the ACLU survey Harris completed that said she favored gender transition surgery for minors.

Best buddies with Disney/ABC head

Other criticism of the debate was that Harris and Dana Walden, who oversees Disney and ABC, are very close friends, presenting a conflict of interest for ABC in moderating the debate.

Of course the network would want to put their finger on the scale if they could.

Trump called the debate "three on one" and said he wouldn't do another one--maybe unless it was on Fox News and Sean Hannity was moderating.

Even Hannity would be more fair than ABC News was, in all likelihood.

The perceived unfairness is widespread enough that Harris doesn't seem to be getting much of a bump in polls out of it, at least so far.