CNN has been competing with MSNBC to see who can come up with the most over-the-top attacks on President Trump. And when an agenda is at stake, accuracy is secondary at best.
Tuesday evening, CNN tweeted that James Comey was expected to deny President Trump’s claim that Comey had told Trump he was not being investigated:
Comey expected to refute Trump's assertion that Trump was told he was not under investigation https://t.co/tB574plQfN
— Carol Costello (@CarolCNN) June 6, 2017
CNN’s report was based on anonymous sources, as usual, and four CNN journalists, Gloria Borger, Eric Lichtblau, Jake Tapper and Brian Rokus, were credited with the story. Of course, when Comey’s written testimony was published yesterday, it confirmed rather than refuted Trump’s statement. Consistent with its war footing vis-a-vis the Trump administration, CNN issued a grudging semi-correction:
CORRECTION AND UPDATE: This article was published before Comey released his prepared opening statement. The article and headline have been corrected to reflect that Comey does not directly dispute that Trump was told multiple times he was not under investigation in his prepared testimony released after this story was published.
I have no idea what CNN means by “does not directly dispute” Trump’s statement; Comey has forthrightly confirmed it.
Still hungry for anti-Trump headlines, CNN bungled its coverage of Comey’s live testimony this morning. PJ Media reports:
It was actually Loretta Lynch, President Obama’s attorney general, who asked [Comey] to lie about the probe into Hillary Clinton’s email scandals. According to him, Lynch asked him to not call it an investigation at all — instead, she wanted him to call it a “matter.”
We don’t need to create hypotheticals to figure out that, if Comey had said the same about President Trump or Attorney General Sessions, the media would have spread that info like wildfire. CNN must have thought he was saying Sessions had asked him to not call the Russia probe an “investigation,” because they put out as much in their app’s alert system. They actually had to release a clarification once they realized their falsehood.
Curses, foiled again! It’s been a couple of days for the most mocked name in news.
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