CNN’s Chris Cuomo repeatedly tried to twist Sen. Mike Lee’s words Wednesday morning, and the Utah Republican clearly didn’t like that at all.
Near the end of the segment, Cuomo pointed to a Tuesday interview Lee gave to Breitbart News and accused him of acting as the website’s “poster boy” for bashing former national security advisor Susan Rice.
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Despite Lee’s refutation of Cuomo’s claim, the CNN host proceeded with his line of questioning.
“Why conflate the two issues of the potential of surveillance with a specific instance of incidental surveillance?”
“I’ve done no such thing, for the third time” Lee testily responded. “I’ll reiterate something I’ve said to reporters every single time I’ve been asked about this, and that’s I don’t know what Susan Rice did.”
“Right, but you did say it is not unreasonable to suggest it could have happened,” Cuomo continued. “Now that doesn’t fly in a court of law, but it does fly in a court of public opinion and it does seem as though you’re saying Rice has to prove it wasn’t politically motivated for me to believe that it wasn’t, and that’s not fair.”
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“That is an absolutely absurd manipulation of what I said,” he shot back at Cuomo. “That is not at all what I said. I did in fact say that something like this could have happened. I did in fact say it’s not absurd to suggest something like this could have happened.”
“Every time I’ve said anything like that, it’s been accompanied by ‘I don’t know what Susan Rice did. I don’t know the facts of the case.'”