The Most Busted Name in News

     As stopped clocks tend to be twice a day (or, in Trump's case, twice a year), Donald Trump and the Trumpettes were right about CNN ("the Most Trusted Name in News ™") after it was revealed last night that their breathless, exclusive exposé was a steaming pile of dog shit. It even gave rise to a right wing bot-driven hashtag on Twitter: #ThingsItrustmorethanCNN.
     And, believe me when I say it pains me more than you'll ever know since I've never been the biggest fan of either the WaPo or Glenn Greenwald but... I have to give credit where it's due and link to Greenwald's article of this morning in the Intercept. It was up to the Washington Post, with its second "scoop" in as many weeks, to set the record straight.
     It's all about the "exclusive" that CNN pimped for hours and hours, which everyone in the Democratic Party, it seemed, principally Rep. Ted Lieu on his Twitter account, had disseminated. And that "bombshell" that turned out to be a smoker grenade was about some guy named "Michael J. Erickson" who'd sent an email to Donald Trump, Jr on September 14th last year (remember that date) telling him about a massive cache of hacked emails that was offered to the Trump campaign by Wikileaks.
     Except CNN, in its finite wisdom, and without even reading the email in question, reported that the email was sent to Trump's namesake on September 4th instead of the date it was actually sent, which was September 14th. This week and a half is a crucial distinction to remember because by September 14th, Wikileaks had already made public the cache of emails that had been hacked by (take your pick). In short, all this "Erickson" was doing was offering Don Jr and the Trump campaign purloined emails that were already in the public domain.
     Further fanning the fake flames was that this Erickson was offering Don Jr a GRU encryption key to unlock the Wikileaks cache of Clinton emails. If we were take this at face value (which millions of Trump haters did in the MSM, Capitol Hill and social media), this would seem to be the smoking gun that would finally tie the Trump campaign to the collusive Russians and their so-called conduit in Wikileaks.
     To make matters worse, CNN had dug up an old tweet from Don Jr that mentioned the Clinton emails on September 4th, the date originally given by CNN and, later, CBS and MSNBC, as the date Erickson had sent the email to Donald Trump Jr. Of course, that tweet is worth the paper it was written on.
     Making this fuckup even more maddening, after they'd solemnly and quietly wiped the remnants of the prank cigar off its collective puss, CNN then refused to give any transparency about how the aforementioned fuck up even was possible. In other words, as with administrations and political parties and other powerful organizations the world over, they're circling the wagons, deleting or quietly amending stories without even offering an apology for essentially lying to the American public with, you got it, real fake news, this time. Their arrogance and complete lack of transparency and contrition is breathtaking.
     Of course, the Trump Misadministration that's been treating CNN like a red-headed stepchild since it was the Trump campaign, has been short-stroking this and will be milking it like a 10,000 pound cow for the rest of the winter. Of course, this does not invalidate in the least CNN's credible and factual reporting on the Trump team's collusion with Russia or Robert Mueller's findings.
     And one had to wonder if the two unnamed sources who'd fed this email that CNN, incredibly, couldn't even be bothered to read, were operatives working for the Trump White House to discredit CNN. Knowing of the dirty tricks done by and on behalf of the Trump administration, it's certainly within the realm of possibility. If so, they succeeded beyond their wildest dreams and perfectly predicted CNN's laziness and sloppy reportage of this non-issue.
     Maybe it's time for Winston Smith to retire from MiniTru.