Politics

CNN Runs Bogus Report That Trump Campaign Received Early Access To Hacked Docs

REUTERS/Mike Segar

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Jack Crowe Political Reporter
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In a Friday morning report that has now been debunked, CNN claimed that President Donald Trump, Donald Trump Jr. and others in the Trump organization received a decryption key and web address for hacked WikiLeaks documents in a September 2016 email obtained by congressional investigators.

CNN claimed that the email, allegedly described by multiple sources and verified by Trump Jr.’s attorney, was sent two months after WikiLeaks published hacked Democratic National Committee (DNC) emails and one month before Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s emails were made public. However, the story has now been shown to be riddled with errors. In reality, the email was sent Sept. 14, 2016, one day after WikiLeaks publicly released a batch of stolen emails, not Sept. 4 like CNN originally claimed.

Trump Jr. previously disclosed messages he exchanged with WikiLeaks on Twitter, sent less than three weeks after the email in question. He defended the messages to congressional investigators on the grounds that he corresponded with WikiLeaks in much the same way he had contact with American news outlets.

WikiLeaks, which was called a “non-state hostile intelligence service” by CIA Director Mike Pompeo, has previously relied on decryption keys to grant selective access to hacked documents uploaded to the internet.

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