CNN’s Jake Tapper Smacks Down False Claim Kamala Harris Said Elon Musk ‘Lost’ Free Speech — With Trump Twist

CNN anchor Jake Tapper smacked down a false claim involving Vice President Kamala Harris and X/Twitter CEO Elon Musk and free speech rights.

Over the weekend, spoiler candidate-turned-Trump backer Robert F. Kennedy Jr. commented on a claim that VP Harris “will shut down X if she wins” — supported by a deceptively edited clip.

Kennedy wrote:

Kamala Harris: “He [Musk] has lost his privileges.”
Can someone please explain to her that freedom of speech is a RIGHT, not a “privilege”?

Kamala Harris: “There has to be a responsibility placed on these social media sites to understand their power.”
Translation: “If they don’t police content to conform to government-approved narratives, they will be shut down.”

But once the holiday weekend concluded, and more reliable news sources than “Clown World” and “End Wokeness” became available, the truth was unveiled by Tapper — the interviewer in said clip.

“We were not talking about Musk,” Tapper wrote, and provided links to the transcript and video.

As it turns out, they also weren’t talking about “freedom of speech” either, but they were talking about former President Donald Trump.

The clip is from a post-debate interview following the October 15, 2019 Democratic presidential primary debate. Tapper was asking then-Sen. Harris about her confrontation with Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) to have Trump banned from social media:

TAPPER: So, one of the topics that you chose to talk a lot about, especially confronting Senator Warren on was your push, your call for Twitter to suspend the account of President Trump. Why was that important?

HARRIS: What’s important about it is this, Jake, and I say this as a former prosecutor. You have to take seriously witness intimidation. You have to take seriously an attempt to obstruct justice. You have to take seriously a threat to a witness and really to their safety and potentially their life.

And when you’re talking about Donald Trump, he has 65 million Twitter followers. He has proven himself to be willing to obstruct justice. Just ask Bob Mueller. You can look at the manifesto from the shooter in El Paso to know that what Donald Trump says on Twitter impacts people’s perceptions about what they should and should not do.

And we’re talking about a private corporation, Twitter, that has terms of use, and as far as I’m concerned and I think most people would say, including members of Congress who he has threatened —

TAPPER: Mm-hmm.

HARRIS: — that he has lost his privileges and it should be taken down. The bottom line is that you can’t say that you have one rule for Facebook and you have a different rule for Twitter. The same rule has to apply, which is that there has to be a responsibility that is placed on these social media sites to understand their power. They are directly speaking to millions and millions of people without any level of oversight or regulation, and that has to stop.

TAPPER: He is the president of the United States, and I would — you know, you might argue, first of all, he doesn’t —

HARRIS: He does not have a right to commit a crime because he is president of the United States. He does not have the right to threaten witnesses and threaten their safety because he is president of the United States.

In fact, that’s the very problem with Donald Trump. He thinks he’s above the law, and we cannot keep reinforcing that. And anyone who wants to say, well, this is a matter of free speech, you are not free to threaten the life of a witness. That is a crime.

TAPPER: But how did he threaten the life of a witness? By calling for —

HARRIS: The way that he has talked about this — the whistleblower.

TAPPER: Whistleblower?

HARRIS: Absolutely.

TAPPER: You think that puts the whistleblower’s life in danger?

HARRIS: I absolutely do. Let’s remember this has actually been the subject of certainly discussion in the open about what should be the precautions that are taken to ensure the safety of the whistleblower because of a concern about these threats.

TAPPER: So, without disputing that, let me ask you, but then there’s a slippery slope, right? I mean, does that mean anybody who writes about the whistleblower, anybody who questions the credibility of the whistleblower, that they shouldn’t have their articles, their statements on Twitter read also? I mean, that’s where it all starts heading.

HARRIS: I think that is a fine conversation for a law school debate, but that’s not what we’re talking about. We’re talking about actual words issued by the president of the United States, unfiltered, which have clearly been threatening the life of witnesses to what might be a crime.

TAPPER: And so the other argument that I saw, some Democratic operatives on Twitter asking is, why is this something that an Ohio voter, a Columbus, Ohio voter or voter in Michigan or Iowa or New Hampshire would care about as opposed to other issues that you do talk about on the stump, obviously. Why talk about this issue tonight?

HARRIS: Because it came up.

(LAUGHTER)

TAPPER: Just that —

HARRIS: Because it came up.

Trump would eventually be banned from every major social media platform over his behavior on Jan. 6, 2021 — and was later reinstated by Musk.

Watch above via CNN.