CNN botched another Russia ‘scoop’

The CNN report, published even as a House Intelligence Committee witness was testifying, claimed that Cohen had provided documentation of the edits during a House Intelligence deposition.

The obvious takeaway from the supposed scoop was that Trump’s lawyers would have suborned perjury from Cohen, had they done such a thing. But the operative words here are “would have,” because that’s not quite how things played out this week, as the Daily Caller’s Chuck Ross notes. CNN has since updated its report, which was based on anonymous sources, to remove the earlier suggestion of possible perjury.

Cohen has pleaded guilty to making false statements before Congress. Among other things, he claimed to have abandoned negotiations to build a Trump Tower Moscow in January 2016. Cohen worked on the project through at least June 2016.

His attorney, Lanny Davis, “told CNN that Cohen himself, and not a Trump lawyer, claimed in a draft of his 2017 testimony that the Trump Tower negotiations ended in January 2016,” Ross noted.

CNN changed its report to say that Cohen’s attorney in 2017, Stephen Ryan, helped him draft the changes.

The cable news network also reports that Ryan shared “it with other attorneys who were part of the joint defense agreement, to review for accuracy and potential privilege issues and those attorneys provided some suggested changes,” adding that “Cohen and his attorney approved all changes … ”

Most importantly, CNN now notes that the attorneys who helped edit Cohen’s testimony had no way of knowing whether the information was accurate or not.

Cohen told members of Congress last week that Trump lawyer Jay Sekulow had made the changes to the testimony.

“There were changes made, additions — Jay Sekulow, for one,” Cohen testified. “There were several changes that were made including how we were going to handle that message, which was — the message, of course, being — the length of time that the Trump Tower Moscow project stayed and remained alive.”

This is the latest in a series of screw-ups from CNN on the Russian front, and from the exact same reporters, too.

On. Dec. 8, 2017, CNN reported that Trump and his inner circle received advance notice during the 2016 presidential election of WikiLeaks’ plans to dump thousands of hacked emails belonging to Democratic National Committee staffers and Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta.

The email that supposedly demonstrated this, however, turned out to have been sent after the hacked correspondences were made publicly available. CNN and others initially reported that Trump and his team were given a heads-up, according to an email sent on Sept. 4. But the email in question was actually sent on Sept. 14, after the emails had been published online.

That since-amended CNN report was characterized at the time as a “colossal fuck up,” as one CNN reporter put it to the Washington Examiner.