Alexis Debat (born 1977) is a French commentator on terrorism and national security issues, formerly based in Washington D.C.. He worked as a reporter, consultant, and source for ABC News for six years, as a senior fellow at the Nixon Center, and was a contributing editor to The National Interest. According to Mother Jones, he was the Director of the Terrorism and National Security Program at the Nixon Center. He was also part of the Consulting Committee of the French magazine Politique Internationale, headed by Patrick Wajsman, and worked until September 2007 for the National Security Institute of the George Washington University on Islamist radicalization in Afghanistan since 2005. Since 2003, he has been called an "expert" by Time, U.S. News & World Report, National Journal, the Boston Herald, the Los Angeles Times, Associated Press, PBS, etc. He also wrote op-eds in the Financial Times and the International Herald Tribune.
However, he resigned from ABC News in June 2007, after some ABC officials raised questions about his credentials.
An in-depth inquiry into his work as a consultant cleared his reporting, according to ABC News President David Westin. That investigation found no instances of false reporting, ABC said, but did uncover four details about operations and meetings in Pakistan that could not be confirmed. "None of these discrepancies would rise to the level of a formal, on-air retraction because none of them was material to the substance of our report," Mr. Westin wrote in an internal memo ABC has however deleted articles by Alexis Debat, replaced by the notice "This story has been removed from our Web site because of questions raised about the credibility of one of its authors, Alexis Debat."