President Trump Slams CNN For Misleading Fake News About Don Jr.

As I wrote yesterday, CNN put out a story claiming that during the campaign, Don Jr. was on the hunt for super-secret document to share with the Trump team. Basically HE was the Russian colluder! OMG IT’S ALL OVER IMPEACH 45!

Not much time went by before it was realized that the date in the story had been completely flubbed… and that the documents that Don requested were already publicly available.

Yeah. Really.

CORRECTION: Email to Trump and Trump Jr. from individual offering Wikileaks documents came Sept. 14 — not Sept. 4 — as we reported earlier. Email pointed to docs Trump camp could get publicly. https://t.co/4FOdCebgQL

— Manu Raju (@mkraju) December 8, 2017

They’re all on major damage control… but the damage is done.

CNN believes that its sources were just mistaken and did not want to deliberately mislead the network, @brianstelter reports. https://t.co/cOCw96gGMR pic.twitter.com/0G8AbMv30s

— Peter Sterne (@petersterne) December 9, 2017

According to the article above:

CNN says the sources were mistaken — not malicious
On Friday morning, the original story about Trump and WikiLeaks was in heavy rotation on CNN TV and was the lead story on CNN.com. Other networks scrambled to match the reporting. CBS did match it, complete with the erroneous date. The network issued a correction. NBC’s followup did not include a date, but it did confirm the thrust of the report, as Wemple noted here.

So who were the confidential sources that led CNN and then CBS astray? My Twitter feed was full of journalists saying CNN should out the men/women. “They burned you, so you should burn them” was the idea. But CNN PR says the network does not believe that the sources intended to deceive the reporters…

So how where they found out?

CNN’s correction
Oliver Darcy writes: On Friday afternoon CNN corrected an exclusive report that said candidate Donald Trump and his son Donald Trump Jr. had received an email providing a web address and decryption key that would allow them to access hacked documents from WikiLeaks before the documents were publicly available. When first published Friday morning, the story said the email was sent to the Trumps on September 4, 2016. It was corrected to say that the email was actually sent on Sept. 14, one day after WikiLeaks made the documents public.

–> CNN’s original story relied on multiple sources who “described” the email. The story unraveled when the WashPos obtained a copy of the email in question, which CNN did not have, and reported the September 14 date. A CNN spokesperson said as soon as the network reviewed its reporting and independently confirmed the story was wrong, it moved to make the correction on TV and online. Here’s Darcy’s full story about the correction…

It sounds like they didn’t even bother double checking, honestly.

Like that ABC mess up from a few days ago, the details make ALL the difference.

President Trump is hitting back.

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?

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 9, 2017

CNN’S slogan is CNN, THE MOST TRUSTED NAME IN NEWS. Everyone knows this is not true, that this could, in fact, be a fraud on the American Public. There are many outlets that are far more trusted than Fake News CNN. Their slogan should be CNN, THE LEAST TRUSTED NAME IN NEWS!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 9, 2017

He’s entirely right.

This is outrageous.