CNN’s Jake Tapper claimed on Sunday that not only was CNN not on “the Left,” but that the network did not get anything wrong in its reporting on the Russia investigation.
Tapper made the remarks on CNN’s “State of the Union” when Mick Mulvaney, the acting White House chief of staff, appeared on the show to talk about the conclusion of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation.
“We need to figure out what went wrong with the Mueller report, why — in all fairness to your network, why the media got it so wrong for so long,” Mulvaney said. “How did the media get it so wrong?”
“But I’m not sure what you’re saying the media got wrong,” Tapper responded. “The media reported what — the investigation was going on. Other than the people in the media on the left, not on this network, I don’t know anybody who got anything wrong.”
“We didn’t say that there was conspiracy,” Tapper continued. “We said that Mueller was investigating conspiracy.”
“If that’s your recollection of history, that’s great,” Mulvaney responded. “Face it, come on, the media got this wrong, Jake. It’s Okay. People get stuff wrong all the time, just not at this level. But it’s done now. The report is there. It’s extraordinarily thorough, as you know. I think they talked to 500 people, issued 2,800 subpoenas.”
“And it completely exonerates the president,” Mulvaney added. “There’s no collusion. There’s no obstruction of justice.”
WATCH:
Tapper’s claim that CNN did not get anything wrong in its reporting is factually false.
In December 2017, CNN “made a major error in reporting key details of an alleged offer made to Donald Trump Jr. in September 2016, regarding a batch of documents from WikiLeaks,” The Daily Wire reported at the time. “CNN claimed that Trump Jr. was sent an email on September 4, 2016, from a person named Michael J. Erickson which included a link to WikiLeaks documents and a decryption key to access the purportedly stolen emails. The date CNN reported, however, was incorrect. The actual date of the email was September 14.”
“The date is significant because it shows that Trump Jr. was sent documents from WikiLeaks that were already available to the public, which undermines the key premise of CNN’s story that the Trump campaign was in cahoots with WikiLeaks to bring down the Clinton campaign,” The Daily Wire added.
In May 2017, CNN reported that Jeff Sessions had failed to disclose contacts that he had with Russian officials when he was a senator and CNN “framed the non-disclosures as more evidence of collusion between Russia and the Trump team,” The Daily Caller reported.
In December 2017, according to The Daily Caller, CNN admitted “that FBI emails prove that Sessions’ explanation for the non-disclosures is accurate,” which indicated “that Sessions was following what the FBI told him and was not intentionally trying to mislead the DOJ about his meetings with Russians.”
CNN also falsely reported what former FBI Director James Comey was prepared to say during his testimony before Congress in 2017, leading to the following correction:
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.
Last year, Lanny David, the lawyer for former Trump attorney Michael Cohen, debunked a CNN report that claimed that Cohen had information that Trump was aware of the Trump Tower meeting during the 2016 campaign.
Tapper’s claim that no one at CNN accused the Trump campaign of collusion is also false as CNN anchor Chris Cuomo said just last week: “There’s 100 percent behavior by people around the president that qualifies as collusion.”