Don Jr. Accuses CBS News of ‘Dishonest Hit Piece’ Over Story Claiming He Promoted Gun Company With Ties to Polygamy
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Donald Trump Jr. accused CBS News on Thursday of publishing a “dishonest hit piece” after the media outlet published a story accusing him of promoting a gun company in Utah. He also highlighted the outlet’s dearth of coverage of photographs released this week featuring former President Bill Clinton with one of Jeffrey Epstein’s alleged victims.
“CBS News has no issue writing lies/smears about me, while they’ve been actively protecting Bill Clinton by ignoring & refusing to report on an alleged victim of Jeffrey Epstein claiming she saw Clinton at ‘pedophile island,'” Trump wrote on Twitter.
Photos released by The Daily Mail this week showed new photos of Clinton with one of Epstein’s alleged victims during a 2002 trip to Africa.
The exchange arose after CBS reporters Graham Kates and Jessica Kegu on Wednesday published a story accusing the president’s eldest son of promoting Desert Tech, a gun company owned by polygamists in Utah. Trump Jr. visited the company’s gun range — where he was photographed — during a campaign trip in the state on July 24. He subsequently wrote on Instagram that he had an “awesome time.”
Andrew Surabian, a spokesman for Trump Jr., complained on Twitter that CBS failed to run the full text of a statement responding to the issue.
In the part of the statement CBS quoted, Surabian said, “He had never met the owner of Desert Tech prior to going shooting with him, has no personal relationship with him, only spoke to him about shooting and CBS has no reporting to suggest that he did anything besides spend an hour or so on the gun range with the owner of a prominent gun company, yet they have decided to dredge up allegations from this man’s private life in a pathetic and transparent attempt to smear by association the president’s eldest son.”
Surabian called out CBS for not running his statement in its entirety: “It says a lot about CBS News’s priorities that they would commit two investigative reporters to this nonsense, while still not having written a single story on their website about an alleged victim of known pedophile Jeffrey Epstein claiming that she saw former President Bill Clinton at Epstein’s infamous ‘pedophile island.”
It is common for news organizations to paraphrase statements by public figure for the sake of brevity, though they risk incurring the wrath of their subjects if they take words out of context or fail to obtain approval for any significant omissions.
The polygamist sect associated with the company in question has experienced federal legal trouble. Prosecutors said in March that members of sect participated in a $1.1 billion tax fraud scheme.
