ABC News made headlines last week after incorrectly reporting that former National Security Adviser Mike Flynn was going to testify that Trump ordered him to contact the Russian government during the campaign. If true, this would have seemingly supported the Trump-Russia collusion fantasy. ABC's story turned out to be false. They had to make a major correction and suspend their reporter Brian Ross. It was actually during the transition that Trump's son-in-law directed Flynn to reach out to the Russians, which was a totally normal thing to do.
Now CNN is under fire for another bombshell dud. They initially claimed the Trump team knew about hacked Wikileaks files prior to them being released to the public. However, CNN's general lack of integrity led their reporter to get the date of an email wrong, which upended their whole story.
Sputnik reports:
In an "exclusive report," CNN claimed on Friday that an encryption key providing access to hacked DNC emails from WikiLeaks had been sent to Donald Trump, his son Donald Trump Jr. and aides on September 4, 2016, before the leaks were made public.The email in question was sent from a man named Mike Erikson to Donald Trump Jr. The Daily Caller also obtained the email:
The whistleblower organization published the documents on September 13, so the nine-day advance would be very significant, taking into account ongoing allegations of collusion between the Trump administration and WikiLeaks. Mainstream media have repeatedly claimed that WikiLeaks is working in the interests of the Russian government.
After the story was published, The Washington Post obtained a copy of the email, which was actually sent to the Trump team on September 14, 2016, not September 4, a day after the documents were made public. A number of conflicting reports from other media outlets also pointed out the mistake.
The email shows that Erickson messaged Trump Jr. stating that "Wikileaks has uploaded another (huge 678 mb) archive of files from the DNC."
"It is too big for me to send you by e-mail attachments, but you can download it yourselves," he added, providing a link to the same website cited by Wikileaks the day before.
He also included a link to a decryption key that could be used to access the documents.
Trump blasted the network on Twitter saying, "Fake News CNN made a vicious and purposeful mistake yesterday. They were caught red handed, just like lonely Brian Ross at ABC News (who should be immediately fired for his 'mistake'). Watch to see if @CNN fires those responsible, or was it just gross incompetence?"
CNN lackey Brian Stelter clarified that the network doesn't understand the concept of accountability and denied any wrongdoing:
Can we at least hope they will fire their sources, or not use them again? By the way, 'multiple' actually means a measly two sources, which Stelter knows since he posted CNN's on-air 'correction' to twitter:
Here's CNN's correction made on their website:
Washington (CNN) 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.The original story was edited to reflect their incompetent reporting:
Candidate Donald Trump, his son Donald Trump Jr. and others in the Trump Organization received an email in September 2016 offering a decryption key and website address for hacked WikiLeaks documents, according to an email provided to congressional investigators.Julian Assange also weighed in with pertinent questions for CNN:
The September 14 email was sent during the final stretch of the 2016 presidential race.
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.
After this story was published, The Washington Post obtained a copy of the email Friday afternoon and reported that the email urged Trump and his campaign to download archives that WikiLeaks had made public a day earlier. The story suggested that the individual may simply have been trying to flag the campaign to already public documents.
CNN has now obtained a copy of the email, which lists September 14 as the date sent and contains a decryption key that matches what WikiLeaks had tweeted out the day before.
The email came two months after the hacked emails of the Democratic National Committee were made public and one month before WikiLeaks began leaking the contents of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta's hacked emails. It arrived about a week before WikiLeaks itself messaged Trump Jr. and began an exchange of direct messages on Twitter.
Trump Jr.'s lawyer, Alan Futerfas, suggested the source of the email leak came from Democratic members of the House Intelligence Committee who spoke with Trump Jr. earlier in the week.
Futerfas blasted the committee by saying, "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."
The mainstream media would like people to believe that Russia is behind the 'fake news' of our times. Yet, the most enduring reason people are questioning the major outlets is not because they are being hoodwinked by Putin. Rather, outlets like CNN, ABC, MSNBC, etc., are losing credibility because they're doing such a fine job outing themselves as overzealous fanatics who have no journalistic integrity.
Reader Comments