More #FakeNews from the World Leader in #FakeNews: CNN Claims, Falsely, that Donald Trump Jr. Got an Email Pointing Out Wikileaks Material Hours

So:

CNN claimed that someone named Michael J. Erickson had sent Donald Trump, Jr. an email with a link to Wikileaks material on September 4th.

CNN thought this proved their RUSSIA conspiracy (hat tip to PJMedia's Morning Brief for the Always Capitalize RUSSIA rule) because Wikileaks published those materials publicly on September 13th. Ergo, their report suggested that someone had special non-public access to these materials and tried to get them to Trump.

I guess this would be someone from Wikileaks or someone from RUSSIA.

However, this email was not sent September 4th. The key incriminating data here was the date of the email -- if the email came 9 days before public disclosure of the trove of documents, on September 13th, then that's suspicious.

What did CNN do to verify this key date? Um, not too much, apparently. Because the date of the email was September 14th, after Wikileaks had publicly announced the documents for download on Twitter and made them available to the world.

In other words, Donald Trump Jr. got this email about the documents about 12 hours after everyone else in the world got word of them. He got them relatively late, obviously --people who care about these things had already been emailing the link for 12 hours.

The Daily Caller says this story got major play on CNN television today, despite being completely wrong, and being yet another grossly negligent (or intentional) #FakeNews frame-job about the Trumps.

The Daily Caller says, dryly:

How CNN got its report so wrong is unclear.

It does offer this, though:

The article states that its information was based on a read-out of the Trump Jr. email provided by an unnamed source. Trump Jr.'s lawyer, Alan Futerfas, speculated on Friday that the source was on the Democratic side of the House Intelligence Committee, which interviewed Trump Jr. earlier this week.

But someone on twitter pointed out that the Washington Post, which actually was first to report CNN's enormous #FakeNews boner, had access to the same read-out (a summary of what was said at a meeting or interview) and they got the date right.

Why can't CNN?

Why can't CNN get the most basic things right?

Hours after individuals wrote to CNN pointing out this error, and even after the Washington Post points out the error, CNN is still blathering about a "September 4 email:"

The September 4 email was sent during the final stretch of the 2016 presidential race -- on the same day that Trump Jr. first tweeted about WikiLeaks and Clinton.

...

Congressional investigators are trying to ascertain whether the individual who sent the September email is legitimate and whether it shows additional efforts by WikiLeaks to connect with Trump's son and others on the Trump campaign. The email also indicated that the Trump campaign could access records from former Secretary of State Colin Powell, whose hacked emails were made public by a RUSSIAN front group 10 days later.

That last part is a reference to Colin Powell's emails, released by an alleged RUSSIAN front group, also on September 13th.

Note that Trump's lawyers told CNN that the Wikileaks documents had already been released publicly before this email:

"We understand that the media reported 12 hours prior to this email that the DNC emails had been hacked or leaked," Futerfas said. "We do not know who Mike Erickson is. We have no idea who he is. We never responded to the email."

...but apparently #FakeNews CNN only listens to their anonymous Democrat-leak sources.

See the CNN link above to see their breathless TV reportage of this #VeryFakeNews.

Yet they haven't mentioned the story, to repeat it or retract it, since the Washington Post exposed them as #FakeNews:

And see this video, too:

Update: They finally corrected -- almost five hours after the first report of #FakeNews.

Their correction does not seem to alert the reader that, with the correction, there is literally nothing left to this story. A rando sent Donald Trump, Jr. a link that millions of people were sending -- that's it.

posted by Ace at 03:27 PM

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