President Donald Trump’s son, Donald Trump, Jr., is calling on CNN president Jeff Zucker to appear before the American public and the media to personally account for and explain exactly what happened in what is now the network’s biggest scandal in its history.
“The hypocrisy at CNN is astounding,” Trump, Jr., told Breitbart News in an exclusive statement on Monday. “Facing the biggest fake news scandal in the network’s history after an embarrassing retraction, nobody from the network is answering questions–even to their own reporters–and they have the audacity to demand on-camera press briefings from the White House to boost their ratings and make their personalities famous? Maybe Jeff Zucker should do an on-camera press briefing about CNN’s fake news scandal before the White House does any more of them.”
The statement from President Trump’s son, who now with his brother Eric Trump runs the president’s business empire, comes on the heels of CNN announcing that three senior editorial officials have resigned over what is now the biggest scandal in the network’s history.
CNN published a very fake news article falsely alleging ties between President Trump’s associates Blackstone’s Stephen Schwarzman and SkyBridge Capital founder Anthony Scaramucci and a Russian investment firm. The CNN piece inaccurately claimed that both men, and the president, were under Senate Intelligence Committee and Treasury Department investigation. An independent Breitbart News investigation confirmed that neither the Senate Intelligence Committee nor the Treasury Department were investigating this. The supposed allegation of some kind of wrongdoing was an inaccurate fantasy hatched in the annals of the office of anti-Trump “resistance” leader Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), who asked now Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin to look into questions on this front before President Trump’s inauguration. As Breitbart News reported, a senior administration official confirmed that the matter was looked into and determined to be entirely “without merit.”
CNN’s story was up for a nearly a full day after being published late Thursday night. After Breitbart News’ initial investigation was published mid-Friday, late Friday evening CNN deleted the piece off the internet and later issued an editor’s note formally retracting it and apologizing to Scaramucci. The network has yet to apologize to others maligned in the story, including President Trump or Stephen Schwarzman among others.
What has followed that is perhaps one of the darkest cover-ups in media history, as it was reported in the wake of the grave error and subsequent shoddily-handled retraction, Zucker himself is overseeing—alongside the head of CNN human resources—the internal investigation into the matter. CNN public relations refused for three days to comment publicly on the matter, even to CNN media reporter and Reliable Sources anchor Brian Stelter.
In addition, leaked internal CNN memos show that the network has shifted policy with regard to all “Russia-related content”—forcing reporters, editors, anchors, and producers to get sign-off from senior executives on everything include social media postings.
CNN has still provided no explanation on the record to anyone other than anonymous quotes from a spokesperson in Stelter’s latest piece announcing the resignation of three officials involved in the matter, including the reporter on the byline and two editors. Corporate spokeswoman Emily Kuhn has refused repeatedly for days to answer basic, specific questions about the scandal. She is continuing to refuse to answer questions and she will not provide Zucker for an interview despite repeated requests from Breitbart News for one with him.
Kuhn has similarly not responded when informed Breitbart News was publishing a comment from the son of the president of the United States, Donald Trump, Jr., calling on Zucker to appear in an on-camera briefing before the American public and the media to account for this very fake news scandal.
The three officials who have resigned so far including the original retracted story’s reporter Thomas Frank, a CNN investigative unit editor Eric Lichtblau, and the unit’s executive editor Lex Haris. Sources inside the network tell Breitbart News there are many more CNN officials still employed by the network at this moment who were responsible for misjudgment on this matter, and there are many unanswered questions that President Trump’s son clearly believes Zucker must account for in an on camera briefing.