Sen. Martha McSally (R-AZ) refused to answer a question from CNN reporter Manu Raju. She blew past him, called him a “liberal hack,” and now everyone is aghast that someone could do such a thing to a reporter from one of the most anti-Trump networks in the country. Before CNN starts digging trenches and loading tear gas for their reporting staff who can do no wrong in their eyes, let’s circle back to December of 2017, when Raju reported that Donald Trump, Jr. and other top campaign officials, including then-candidate Donald Trump, had super-secret access to the trove of emails that WikiLeaks had in their possession. Some donor named Michael Erickson emailed the access code. Gasp! Team Trump knew about the DNC emails before they were made public. Talk about a bombshell, except that it wasn’t. CNN couldn’t take two seconds to read the time stamp on the email. If they did, they would have seen that the emails from Wikileaks had already been made public when this donor email was sent. And for hours, the fake news story was blasted all over the network, but it’s okay folks. The anonymous source was determined that his or her intentions were not meant to deceive. What idiots do they have working there? Maybe the finest in liberal America.

When your colleague @mkraju falsely reported that @DonaldJTrumpJr got advance notice of Wikileaks dumps, did he deliberately lie about it, was he too stupid to read the date on the e-mail, or did CNN not care as long as your network’s fake news hurt Trump?https://t.co/hk7RbN8hUe — Sean Davis (@seanmdav) January 16, 2020

Let’s go to the story, which has now been corrected:

Candidate Donald Trump, his son Donald Trump Jr. and others in the Trump Organization received an email in September 2016 offering a decryption key and website address for hacked WikiLeaks documents, according to an email provided to congressional investigators. The September 14 email was sent during the final stretch of the 2016 presidential race. CNN originally reported the email was released September 4 -- 10 days earlier -- based on accounts from two sources who had seen the email. The new details appear to show that the sender was relying on publicly available information. The new information indicates that the communication is less significant than CNN initially reported.

Oh, the memories with this fake news story:





Statement from CNN PR pic.twitter.com/H7XZ8Fuzdi — Oliver Darcy (@oliverdarcy) December 8, 2017

But if 2 sources independently confirm to you that it's a banana..... https://t.co/eWWYEb96m8 — Larry O'Connor (@LarryOConnor) December 9, 2017

I'm seeing lots of tweets saying CNN should out the sources that misinformed @MKRaju. But @CNNPR says the network does not believe that the sources *intended* to deceive... https://t.co/wKl9rX7Ibc — Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) December 9, 2017

“My sources lies to me about information I could have verified and that was readily available and open to the public online” — Stephen Miller (@redsteeze) December 8, 2017

Yeah, but prior to this correction, it was The Washington Post coming in and doing the clean-up work for this mess:

A 2016 email sent to candidate Donald Trump and top aides pointed the campaign to hacked documents from the Democratic National Committee that had already been made public by the group WikiLeaks a day earlier. The email — sent the afternoon of Sept. 14, 2016 — noted that "Wikileaks has uploaded another (huge 678 mb) archive of files from the DNC" and included a link and a "decryption key," according to a copy obtained by The Washington Post. The writer, who said his name was Michael J. Erickson and described himself as the president of an aviation management company, sent the message to the then-Republican nominee as well as his eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., and other top advisers. The day before, WikiLeaks had tweeted links to what the group said was 678.4 megabytes of DNC documents.

Raju eventually admitted the whole story was garbage on-air. So, yeah—CNN’s reporter might have been at the receiving end of some harsh treatment today by a Republican Senator. He’ll be fine. And yes, he has confronted Ilhan Omar and other clowns on the Left, but that doesn’t negate the fact that he and this network were part of this epic fail. In fact, CNN, in general, is just a hot dumpster fire when it comes to covering this president. I will say so again: when you can’t even cover the feeding of koi fish—a simple photo op—between Trump and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe accurately, your operation has issues.