During an appearance in New York on Monday, CBS journalist Lesley Stahl raised eyebrows when she claimed that President Trump had admitted to her he was out to protect himself from factual reporting with his combative stance against the press. But she had sat on the quote and didn’t say anything about it for two years and a 60 Minutes interview later.

During Wednesday’s S.E. Cupp Unfiltered, CNN senior media reporter Brian Stelter and HLN host S.E. Cupp bought into Stahl’s questionable claims and used them to bash the President as a beacon to authoritarian dictators the world over.

“So what I've been saying for 18 months is confirmed,” Cupp self-righteously declared. “President Trump's war on the media is intentional and the goal is to create confusion and sow distrust.” She suggested Trump said it “point blank,” but her evidence was Stahl’s account. “Yep, he said it. He wants you to be confused. And it's worked,” she proclaimed. “So basically, according to Lesley Stahl, Trump has admitted to manipulating people. How insulted should voters and viewers feel,” she asked Stelter.

Stelter was amused by her use of “insulted” for how Americans should feel. “I think insulted is exactly the right word. Because that is what it is. He's trying to pull the wool over people's eyes and according to Stahl, he admitted it,” he asserted. “This was only a few days after he was elected, by the way, before he even took office. That’s was before he started using the term fake news.”

All of this discussion about how Trump supposedly had a long-term, maniacal plan to discredit the press raised questions about the validity of the claims. Mainly, if the plan was so important to keeping Trump protected from the truth, why would he spill the beans to Stahl? But such serious questions weren’t important enough for the pair because they needed to slam Trump as a dictator, a CNN staple. And Cupp led the way:

Well, let’s be clear. Trump isn't manipulating people because he thinks the news is biased. He's manipulating people because he thinks the news is true. And that's dangerous. It’s not just an assault on Democracy here, it reverberates around the world. Some of the despots who have invoked Trump's “fake news,” quite literally the worst people on the planet: Syria’s Bashas ai-Assad, Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro, Philippines’ Rodrigo Duterte.

Cupp then displayed the Newseum’s “world press freedom map,” which purports to show how free the press is by country and wondered if Trump was damaging the world. “Yes, he's been changing that map, he’s been making it darker. We saw that in data from 2016 versus '17 versus this year. In fact, the effects of his rhetoric are being felt more abroad than they are here,” Stelter said as he praised the American press for ‘rising to the occasion’ and downplaying their embarrassing failures.

“It's kind of like a hurricane that sits offshore; just churns the water and erodes the sand. It doesn't happen right away. It takes time for the effects,” Stelter chided. “But when the hurricane passes, the sun comes out, you see there's no more beach and you realize that everybody suffers. That is kinda what his rhetoric does. It's a slow acting sort of erosion that causes damage to the press.”

When they finally got around to asking why it took so long for Stahl to share her account, Stelter’s speculation didn’t pass the smell test. According to his “educated” guess, CBS was trying to stay on Trump’s good side so they could get another interview. “Now, it's 18 months, I think maybe they've given up and maybe they think, ‘you know what, so what, now we're going tell what happened.’ That’s my theory.”

But Stelter’s educated guess didn’t seem so educated seeing as the original interview had Stahl hounding the then President-elect. And since then, they’ve had another 60 Minute segments critical of the Trump administration, most recently was their Stormy Daniels interview. And that’s not to mention their normal CBS newscasts.

Of course, this was just another opportunity for them to take more shots at the President with claims that cannot be verified.

The transcript is below, click "expand" to read: