CNN Addresses Lanny Davis-Michael Cohen Report Without Answering Any Questions About It
CNN repeated today at length that they stand by their initial reporting in an article that caused, at the time, a media scrum and is causing now a question about their sourcing and the veracity of their reporting on that sourcing.
In repeating that they stand by the article, and despite producing the new article on the topic, the network, and the reporters who wrote the story, did not address the questions posed by Buzzfeed’s reporting, by the Daily Caller, and others.
“CNN stands by its story” is not a form of addressing those questions.
As we’ve covered here at Mediaite, the questions stem from the “I did it, I didn’t do it” stories coming from Michael Cohen‘s attorney Lanny Davis, who says he was one of CNN’s anonymous sources.
CNN reported in their new article that Davis made that claim, without stating whether he was telling the truth or not.
In the original article, CNN stated that Lanny Davis “declined to comment”. As Buzzfeed and other sites have pointed out, Davis was also quoted as an anonymous source. That raises a serious question about how honestly they presented the information.
In their explanation on Tuesday, they simply did not address that at all. A CNN staffer told Buzzfeed “We should address Lanny Davis’s comments in our reporting and be more transparent with our readers about our reporting.”
Instead of doing that, the article points out the many times Lanny Davis has changed his own tune about what he has said, what Michael Cohen knows, and who they spoke to about it, which is certainly a valid point, but not one that excludes addressing their own reporting.
The guilty plea put new focus on Cohen and the discrepancy over his accounts of the Trump Tower meeting. After Cohen’s plea, Davis began to change his story.
When CNN’s Wolf Blitzer asked Davis on August 22 whether Cohen had evidence that Trump knew about the meeting beforehand, Davis said: “At this juncture I can only say that he was present during a discussion with Junior and dad, and beyond that, his testimony to the Senate Intelligence and House Intelligence committees was accurate.”
Several hours after that, Davis changed his account, this time focusing on Cohen’s testimony before Congress last year.
In an interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper, Davis said: “Senator Burr and Senator Warner read the answer to the question about his testimony which is that he said he was not aware ahead of time and did not hear anything to the contrary and that was the testimony.”“He said he wasn’t aware ahead of time and did not hear anything to the contrary and that was the testimony before the Senate as well the House Intelligence Committees and he said that testimony was accurate,” Davis continued.
When pressed by Cooper on whether Cohen had information on Trump having knowledge about the meeting ahead of time, Davis replied: “No, there’s not.”Davis has reversed course from two other claims regarding his client’s knowledge of Trump over the past week. One dealt with what Cohen knew about Trump’s “awareness” of damaging emails to Clinton’s campaign that could have been obtained from hacking. The other concerned a letter that Trump’s lawyers allegedly sent the special counsel over hush money payments to two women.
In both cases, Davis walked back initial claims.
They also dropped a pretty blatant hint about who one of their other anonymous sources might have been.
Cohen, unlike Davis, has not publicly addressed what he might have said to friends, associates or reporters about these matters.
If Michael Cohen was an anonymous source, he can’t be too happy about that line. But it would certainly explain CNN’s refusal to give up the story. But it doesn’t explain why they can’t answer some of the questions that should be easy to answer.
Still kind of a mystery to me why @jimsciutto and @carlbernstein can't just write in their own words that Lanny Davis was one of their sources — he told me so himself on the record! Also lol can BuzzFeed News get a LINK pic.twitter.com/xJ7OtnyPs9
— Steven Perlberg (@perlberg) August 28, 2018
The questions not answered by CNN’s new article are:
1) Was Lanny Davis a source? He says he was, and the Washington Post and New York Post confirmed he was an anonymous source for them on the same story.
2) If Lanny Davis was a source, why did the original article claim he declined to comment?
And a third and new question: 3) did you just burn/out Michael Cohen for being an anonymous source for the original story?
The question Lanny Davis hasn’t answered to anyone’s satisfaction is “why did you make this claim about Cohen’s apparent eyewitness to an event if it is not true?”
The article posted today effectively describes the Lanny Davis timeline, but nobody was pressuring CNN to explain what Davis was doing. The pressure was for CNN to explain what they did, and to that they have not yet supplied a response.
[Featured image via screengrab]
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