CNN has a really bad day
Flubs Trump e-mail date
The Washington Post on Friday shot down a CNN report that said then-candidate Donald Trump and his top aides received advance access to hacked WikiLeaks documents — with the newspaper revealing that the files were actually already public at the time.
CNN reported Friday morning that Trump, his son Donald Trump Jr. and others at the Trump Organization got an e-mail on Sept. 4, 2016, that provided information on how to view documents swipedped from the Demo-ocratic National Committee.
But the email was actually sent Sept. 14, 2016, a day af-f- ter WikiLeaks put the documents online, The Washington Post reported later Friday.
The e-mail noted, “WikiLeaks has uploaded another (huge 678 mb) archive of files from the DNC,” and included a link and a “decryption key,” according to the newspaper, which obtained a copy of the message.
The sender identified himself as Michael J. Erickson and described himself as president of an aviation-management firm.
The message also noted information from ex-Secretary of State Colin Powell’s inbox was available on the Web site DCLeaks. That development had been publicly reported earlier that day.
The e-mail, from a Yahoo address, indicates the writer may have simply been flagging information already widely available, the paper reported.
Trump Jr.’s attorney, Alan Futerfas, said Erickson was unknown to his client or the campaign and noted that Trump Jr. got “a ton of unsolicited e-mails like this on a variety of topics.”
The message was one of thousands turned over to the House Intelligence Committee and other officials probing Russian interference in the 2016 election.
Trump Jr. was asked about the e-mail Wednesday during an eight-hour closed-door interview with the committee.
“The e-mail was never read or responded to — and the House Intelligence Committee knows this,” Futerfas said. “It is profoundly disappointing that members of the House Intelligence Committee would deliberately leak a document, with the misleading suggestion that the information was not public, when they know that there is not a scintilla of evidence that Mr. Trump Jr. read or responded to the e-mail.”
Futerfas expressed anger that details of the committee session leaked out before it had ended.
“We are concerned that these actions, combined with the deliberate and misleading leak of a meaningless e-mail, undermines the credibility of the serious work the House Intelligence Committee is supposedly undertaking,” he said.
Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY), top Democrat on the House Judiciary panel, latched onto the original CNN story to attack Team Trump.
“This e-mail is yet another sign that senior Trump campaign officials — including Donald Trump Jr. and perhaps the president himself — may have accepted assistance and valuable information from the Russian government and its partners,” he said.