Another Exploding Cigar Blows Up In CNN’s Face [Updated]

CNN, in its daily effort to discredit President Trump, hastily published a leak from Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee that turned out to be false. CNN initially claimed that someone emailed Donald Trump, Jr. a link to a Wikileaks DNC dump on September 4, 2016. CNN said this information was based on “accounts from two sources who had seen the email.” Those sources obviously were Democrat committee members or staffers; Donald Jr. testified about the email before the Intelligence Committee on Wednesday.

CNN attributed significance to the email because it allegedly was dated September 4, nine days before the Wikileaks documents in question were made public. But–oops–the Democrats misinformed CNN. The email is actually dated September 14, the day after the documents were released. So a Trump supporter was simply trying to call the Trump campaign’s attention to publicly-available documents.

CNN has shamefacedly corrected its story, which it also trumpeted on television:

Correction: This story has been corrected to say the date of the email was September 14, 2016, not September 4, 2016. The story also changed the headline and removed a tweet from Donald Trump Jr., who posted a message about WikiLeaks on September 4, 2016.
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CNN originally reported the email was released September 4 — 10 days earlier — based on accounts from two sources who had seen the email. The new details appear to show that the sender was relying on publicly available information. The new information indicates that the communication is less significant than CNN initially reported.

Actually, the “new details”–i.e., the correct email date–mean that the communication has no significance whatsoever.

A Trump lawyer jams the error, plainly born of eagerness to “get” the president, down CNN’s throat, as reported by the Washington Post:

Alan S. Futerfas, an attorney for Trump Jr., described it as one of “a ton of unsolicited emails like this on a variety of topics.”

Futerfas said Erickson [the sender] was unknown to Trump Jr. or the campaign. The message was one of thousands turned over to the House Intelligence Committee and others investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election, emails that included spam and junk emails. Trump Jr. was asked about the email Wednesday, when he spent about seven hours behind closed doors answering questions from members of the committee.

“The email was never read or responded to — and the House Intelligence Committee knows this,” Futerbas said. “It is profoundly disappointing that members of the House Intelligence Committee would deliberately leak a document, with the misleading suggestion that the information was not public, when they know that there is not a scintilla of evidence that Mr. Trump Jr. read or responded to the email.”

…He expressed anger that details of the session leaked out before it had even concluded. “We are concerned that these actions, combined with the deliberate and misleading leak of a meaningless email, undermine the credibility of the serious work the House Intelligence Committee is supposedly undertaking,” he said.

It’s another black mark for CNN. I have said before that CNN should abandon all of its television programming, and simply fill the screen with a sign that says, “We hate President Trump.” That would save a lot of trouble, and avoid quite a few factual errors.

UPDATE: CBS picked up CNN’s fake news and couldn’t bear to let go of it. Twitchy has the story. When the entire story blew up in the faces of CNN and CBS (and no doubt others), CBS couldn’t bear to call it a correction. Hey, what do the facts matter when you are trying to #Resist?

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