CNN’s Chris Cuomo
© Reuters / Mike Blake; inset: Pixabay / 526663
CNN's Chris Cuomo attempted to prove President Donald Trump wrong about whether a non-speakerphone call could be overheard by a bystander - by calling his mother, live on air. Cringe ensued.

Cuomo called up his mom to disprove Trump's claim that "he's never been able to hear a phone call when it wasn't on speakerphone from anybody," asking her to say hello to his co-host, Dana Bash. If Cuomo was right, and Trump was wrong, Bash should have been able to hear Mom's voice. It didn't quite go that way.


The stunt fell flat, leaving Bash expectantly staring at the phone. Cuomo quickly pressed speakerphone, allowing everyone in the room to hear his mother's voice briefly, then switched it off and again asked her to talk. After a few awkward seconds of silence, he nevertheless declared victory - even as a co-host protested he'd heard nothing.


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"But this is across the table!" the co-host insisted, pointing out that he was the exact distance from Cuomo that US Ambassador to the EU Gordon Sondland had been when David Holmes, chief policy aide to US Ambassador to Ukraine Bill Taylor, supposedly overheard a phone conversation with Trump while sitting in a restaurant.


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Twitter didn't hold back on mocking Cuomo, including multiple references to his hated nickname, along with a surprising number of comparisons to celebrity lawyer Johnny Cochran's "If the glove does not fit, you must acquit" moment during the OJ Simpson trial.

"Pretty sure i heard her say, 'Lighten up Fredo,'" snarked one tweeter.


Cuomo's stunt was a response to Trump's insistence that Holmes could not possibly have overheard Trump's side of the conversation in which Trump supposedly asked Sondland whether Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky would "do the investigations" and Sondland replied that the leader would "do anything you ask him to." By "the investigations," Trump was presumably referring to the corruption probe of natural gas company Burisma that allegedly formed part of a quid pro quo between Trump and Zelensky, along with an inquiry into Ukrainian meddling in the 2016 election.

Holmes called his eavesdropping "an extremely distinctive experience in my Foreign Service career," shocked that "a conversation of this level of candor, colorful language" could unfold between the president and a diplomat while he, Holmes, was seated at dinner with him.

However, that same conversation was already mentioned in the testimony of Taylor and Sondland himself, and Trump called the aide out on Twitter, noting that while he'd "been watching people making phone calls my entire life...never have I been watching a person making a call, which was not on speakerphone, and been able to hear or understand a conversation" - even when straining to listen.