CNN host Brian Stelter grilled BuzzFeed News over basic journalistic principles that seemed to fall through the cracks in the way its reporters sought comment from special counsel Robert Mueller’s office for a bombshell story about President Trump and his former personal lawyer Michael Cohen.
Going over emails exchanged between reporter Jason Leopold and Mueller spokesman Peter Carr before the report’s publication on Thursday, Stelter condemned what he said was a “dereliction of duty” in how a journalist should pursue a comment for a story.
BuzzFeed Editor-in-Chief Ben Smith joined Stelter in studio Sunday alongside the other reporter behind the disputed report, Anthony Cormier. The two defended the article.
Stelter brought up how sources close to Mueller spokesman Peter Carr told the Washington Post that Carr likely would have responded to BuzzFeed’s initial inquiry differently had he been given more information.
[Related: BuzzFeed News stands by report despite Mueller pushback]
—@BrianStelter presses @BuzzFeedBen on the “shockingly casual” email sent to request comment from Special Counsel’s office: “Do you think that was an appropriate and sufficient way to ask for comment?” pic.twitter.com/oE2qGQKY2N
— Oliver Darcy (@oliverdarcy) January 20, 2019
As has become routine over the course of the Mueller investigation, Carr declined to comment after Leopold asked for a response to “a story coming stating that Michael Cohen was directed by President Trump himself to lie to Congress about his negotiations related to the Trump Moscow project.”
However, the report that was published Thursday went further, citing unnamed federal law enforcement officials who said Cohen told Mueller’s team that the president had ordered him to be untruthful to lawmakers about a Trump Tower project in Russia before the 2016 election. The report also said Mueller had documentation to back up this assertion.
“To me, this is a shocking, casual way to ask for comment for such a serious story,” Stelter said during his program “Reliable Sources.”
Smith disagreed, leaning on the notion that Mueller’s spokesman is notoriously tight-lipped regarding the specifics of the ongoing inquiry.
“I don’t think — if you got an email from Jason Leopold saying, ‘Hey, we’re working on a story whose substance is that you were involved in an incredibly high-stakes and incredibly shocking thing,’ that you would say, ‘No, that’s not a big deal.’ I think that we stated the heart of the story there,” Smith said. “We would have loved to have gotten more detail from him.”
“But come on, one paragraph? That’s a dereliction of duty to send a three-sentence email,” Stelter responded, adding that when he reaches out for comment, his email comes in the form of a “bullet-point, long email.”
“We have broken a series of the biggest stories about the special counsel’s investigation. We broke a lot of the details on Paul Manafort’s indictment soon before the indictment came down. We broke the information around the Trump Tower Moscow that would be the heart of the Cohen indictment months before,” Smith said. “I think that it has not been our experience that the special counsel is forthcoming with information.”
About 24 hours after BuzzFeed published its report, as congressional Democrats began clamoring for investigations and stirring up talk of impeachment, Carr did issue a public statement, saying the news organization’s “description of specific statements to the Special Counsel’s Office, and characterization of documents and testimony obtained by this office, regarding Michael Cohen’s Congressional testimony are not accurate.”
Cohen pleaded guilty in November, as part of Mueller’s federal Russia investigation, to “knowingly and willfully” making “a materially false, fictitious and fraudulent statement and representation” to the House and Senate Intelligence Committees in 2017 about the potential Trump Organization real estate deal in Moscow. He was sentenced to two months in prison for the charge, which will be served concurrently with the three years he received for campaign finance violations and tax and bank fraud.
