Lanny Davis, who is representing President Trump’s former personal lawyer Michael Cohen, admitted Monday that he was an anonymous source for a CNN report about the infamous Trump Tower meeting that has come under scrutiny.
The report by CNN said Cohen saw Donald Trump Jr. notify his father of the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting with a Russian lawyer before it took place, contradicting what Trump’s denials of knowing about it ahead of time. The report also claimed that Cohen was willing to disclose that information to special counsel Robert Mueller. Three people have bylines on the report: veteran journalist Carl Bernstein, CNN’s chief national security correspondent Jim Sciutto, and CNN researcher and producer Marshall Cohen.
The report cites unnamed sources and says Davis declined to comment, but in speaking to BuzzFeed News, Davis admitted he was in fact a source.
In recent days the CNN report has come under fire after Davis went on the record with other outlets to say he was their confirming source in follow-ups and apologized. A Washington Post follow-up to CNN’s story, which said Cohen told associates he witnessed a discussion between Trump Jr. and his father about the forthcoming Trump Tower meeting, had Davis as an unnamed source. He admitted in a Post report over the weekend that he was the source and admitted that he doesn’t know for sure what his client may know about the Trump Tower meeting.
[Lanny Davis: I have no idea if that story I confirmed about the Trump Tower meeting is true or not]
“I should have been more clear — including with you — that I could not independently confirm what happened,” Davis told the Post in admitting on the record he was the source. He added: “I regret my error.”
Despite the backlash, CNN is so far standing by its reporting. “We stand by our story, and are confident in our reporting of it,” a CNN spokesperson told BuzzFeed News.
Trump Jr. himself has knocked CNN for standing by the report, accusing the news network of covering for “leftist hack” Bernstein.
Davis also admitted to misleading viewers on CNN just last week, during an interview with Anderson Cooper, when he said he was not a source in the CNN report. “I think the reporting of the story got mixed up in the course of a criminal investigation,” Davis told Cooper. “We were not the source of the story.”
Davis told BuzzFeed News that this was false and that he was anonymous source for the CNN article. “I made a mistake,” Davis said.
