A key piece of information was missing from a BuzzFeed News reporter’s initial request for comment from special counsel Robert Mueller’s office before publishing a now-disputed report about President Trump.
Mueller’s spokesman Peter Carr declined to provide a response to the reporter when he was asked about an upcoming story “stating that Michael Cohen was directed by President Trump himself to lie to Congress about his negotiations related to the Trump Moscow project,” according to emails obtained by the Washington Post.
However, the report that was published Thursday went further, claiming that Cohen had told Mueller the president instructed him to lie and that Mueller’s office had learned about Trump’s orders through a witness from the Trump Organization as well as messages and documents.
About 24 hours later, after congressional Democrats began clamoring for investigations and stirring up talk of impeachment, Carr made the rare move of issuing an on-the-record statement to dispute the report. BuzzFeed editor-in-chief Ben Smith said his team stands by its reporting and called on Mueller’s office to further clarify what it was disputing.
Mueller’s team waited nearly a day to respond because they were searching for any evidence to support BuzzFeed’s reporting, but they found nothing of the sort. The office of Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein also reached out to Mueller’s team to inquire if there would be a response while one was already in the works.
Notably, emails show that after the initial correspondence but before the story’s publication, Carr sent BuzzFeed reporter Jason Leopold, one of the report’s co-authors, a partial transcript of Cohen’s plea hearing in which the lawyer admitted to lying to Congress.
“I made these misstatements to be consistent with Individual 1’s political messaging and out of loyalty to Individual 1,” Cohen said late last year. “Individual 1” is widely understood to be Trump.
Although sources told the Post that Carr hoped this would tip Leopold off on what Cohen didn’t say during his testimony, Leopold didn’t seem to catch on.
“I am not reading into what you sent and have interpreted it as an FYI,” Leopold wrote.
Carr replied, saying indeed it was “just an FYI.”
