Four Fake Trump Stories The Establishment Media Ran With, Then Retracted

On Monday, we witnessed the legacy media’s latest retraction of a false story about President Donald Trump.

The Wall Street Journal published audio from a phone call between the former Commander-in-Chief and Georgia election investigator Frances Watson. Though the Washington Post originally claimed that Trump pressured Watson to “find the fraud” in Georgia’s ballot count during the 2020 election, the outlet corrected its story following the audio’s release.

The correction came months after Democrats in Congress used the quotes as evidence against President Trump during his most recent impeachment trial.

As Rep. Madeleine Dean (D-PA) said during the proceedings, “Trump called the chief investigator for the Georgia Bureau of Investigations, who was conducting an audit — an audit of the signature matching procedures for absentee ballots. Trump urged him, ‘find the fraud,’ and claimed the official would be ‘a national hero’ if he did.”

President Trump was not thrilled about the false reporting.

“The Washington Post just issued a correction as to the contents of the incorrectly reported phone call I had with respect to voter fraud in the Great State of Georgia,” noted the 45th President in a statement about the correction. “While I appreciate the Washington Post’s correction, which immediately makes the Georgia Witch Hunt a non-story, the original story was a Hoax, right from the very beginning.”

“You will notice that establishment media errors, omissions, mistakes, and outright lies always slant one way — against me and against Republicans,” Trump continued. “Meanwhile, stories that hurt Democrats or undermine their narratives are buried, ignored, or delayed until they can do the least harm — for example, after an election is over.”

Unfortunately, the Washington Post story is far from an anomaly. Here are four more examples of times legacy media outlets posted fabricated stories about Trump, only to quietly retract them later.

CNN — Scaramucci and Russia

CNN retracted a story alleging that the Senate Intelligence Committee was investigating a Russian financier linked to Trump transition team member Anthony Scaramucci.

According to the report, Scaramucci — who worked as the White House Director of Communications for just eleven days in the summer of 2017 — was under federal scrutiny for meeting with the head of a $10 billion Russian fund before the 2016 election. CNN based the entire story upon one anonymous source who claimed that two Senate Democrats were interested in whether Scaramucci promised the lifting of Russian sanctions during the meeting.

Three CNN journalists — reporter Thomas Frank, assistant managing editor Eric Lichtblau, and executive editor Lex Haris — resigned in the aftermath of the retraction. Frank and Lichtblau are Pulitzer Prize recipients.

Other legacy media outlets quickly reframed the incident as an attack by President Trump against the media.

“President Trump resumed beating his ‘fake news!’ drum Tuesday, going off on CNN after the network retracted a story about alleged ties between Trump’s allies and Russia,” read the first sentence of a Washington Post article entitled “Trump renews attack on ‘Fake News CNN’ after retraction.”

“CNN was forced to apologize after retracting a story on its website that a Russian bank linked to a close ally of President Trump was under Senate investigation… But the mea culpa did not stop Mr. Trump and his supporters from seizing on the mistake, condemning CNN and claiming it as evidence that other major news organizations were conspiring against the administration,” reported The New York Times.

“The president could not resist another dig on Tuesday at the network,” reported BBC. “Mr Trump has often accused the organisation of ‘fake news’ and refused to answer questions put to him by one of its journalists.”

The New York Times — Intelligence Community

The New York Times corrected a story claiming that all seventeen intelligence agencies affirmed that Russia orchestrated hacking attacks against the United States. In reality, thirteen of the agencies reached no such conclusion.

“A White House Memo article on Monday about President Trump’s deflections and denials about Russia referred incorrectly to the source of an intelligence assessment that said Russia orchestrated hacking attacks during last year’s presidential election,” read the publication’s correction. “The assessment was made by four intelligence agencies — the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the National Security Agency. The assessment was not approved by all 17 organizations in the American intelligence community.”

Following the retraction, more journalists angled their stories around a perceived war between President Trump and the media, rather than emphasizing low journalistic standards among many legacy outlets.

“The relationship between Trump and the news media regularly hits new lows, with insults flying between the two camps and reporters warning that the president is inciting violence against journalists,” wrote Jonathan Easley for The Hill. “But Trump’s allies on the right believe the president’s claims that the mainstream media is ‘fake news’ have been bolstered by recent missteps. They point to recent admissions from top news outlets — including CNN, The New York Times and The Associated Press — that bombshell stories were either overcooked or included incorrect details.”

Buzzfeed — Michael Cohen

Citing the testimony of two anonymous federal officials, Buzzfeed News reported that “President Donald Trump directed his longtime attorney Michael Cohen to lie to Congress about negotiations to build a Trump Tower in Moscow.”

The Buzzfeed article prompted Robert Mueller — the Special Counsel for the Department of Justice who oversaw the Russian collusion investigation — to issue a rare public rebuke of the story. 

“BuzzFeed’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,” said Peter Carr, a spokesman for Mueller’s office.

Buzzfeed added an editor’s note to its original story insisting that their reporting was “based on detailed information from senior law enforcement sources.” Though Buzzfeed Editor-in-Chief Ben Smith stated that the “reporting included documents — specifically, pages of notes that were taken during an interview of Cohen by the FBI,” Buzzfeed did not release the documents or the names of the anonymous sources.

MSNBC — Deutsche Bank

MSNBC anchor Lawrence O’Donnell reported in 2019 that Russian moguls co-signed Deutsche Bank loans to President Trump — a story that MSNBC later retracted.

O’Donnell backtracked only after Trump attorney Charles Harder told the network to “immediately and prominently retract, correct and apologize for the … false and defamatory statements.”

“Last night on this show I discussed information that wasn’t ready for reporting,” O‘Donnell said on August 28. “I did not go through the rigorous verification and standards process here at MSNBC before repeating what I heard from my source. Had it gone through that process I would not have been permitted to report it. I should not have said it on air or posted it on Twitter. I was wrong to do so.“

He added that “we don‘t know whether the information is inaccurate,” but “we do know it wasn‘t ready for broadcast, and for that I apologize.“

The views expressed in this piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

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