Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich said on Tuesday that CNN should consider bringing in an independent counsel to investigate the company as a whole amid a fake news scandal in which they retracted a hit piece pertaining to President Donald Trump.
“They should appoint an outside analyst, somebody of impeccable authority like Michael Mukasey, who used to be Attorney General of the United States, to view everything of CNN and basically reset it,” he told Fox and Friends in an interview. Gingrich continued:
You cannot get to a believable network while Zucker is there. He clearly made a gamble last year to be the leading anti-Trump network, he’s clearly done things that are absurdly wrong. I like lots of the people at CNN, I worked with them for a while. There are some very very good people at CNN, they have a very long tradition of being good journalists. But the culture of the overall system right now is very toxic.
Gingrich’s comments come after the network retracted a story alleging links between former Trump transition team member Anthony Scaramucci and the Russian Direct Investment Fund — an incident that has since led to the resignation of three CNN employees.
Furthermore, footage obtained by investigative journalist James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas showed a senior CNN producer admitting that the network’s relentless coverage of President Donald Trump over alleged links to Russia was “mostly bullsh*t.”
On Tuesday, Deputy Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders described the network as “a disgrace to journalism.”
Responding to the crisis at the network, Donald Trump wrote on Twitter: “Fake News CNN is looking at big management changes now that they got caught falsely pushing their phony Russian stories.
He then went on to attack other networks including NBC, CBS, and ABC, as well as the The New York Times and The Washington Post, describing them as “all fake news.”
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