Davis, Cohen’s lawyer and spokesperson, said he also regrets lying about his involvement in the story on CNN's air last week.
Attorney Lanny Davis says he was an anonymous source in a July CNN story
that reported his client, Michael Cohen, had privately claimed that
President Trump had advance knowledge of the infamous Trump Tower
meeting between his son and Russians — contradicting Davis's own words
on CNN's air last week.
In the story, Cohen was reported to claim
he had personally witnessed Donald Trump Jr. informing then-candidate
Trump about the June 2016 meeting. Such a claim from Cohen would
directly contradict Trump’s statements about his knowledge of the
meeting, where Russians were set to offer dirt on Hillary Clinton.
CNN’s
July 26 story has come under fresh scrutiny in recent days after Davis
acknowledged he had served as an anonymous source for multiple news
outlets who were seeking to confirm the CNN article in the hours after
it published. Davis has backed away from the story in recent days,
telling the Washington Post that he is not certain if the claim is
accurate, and that he could not independently corroborate it.
Last
week, Davis told Anderson Cooper, “I think the reporting of the story
got mixed up in the course of a criminal investigation. We were not the
source of the story.”
On Monday evening, Davis told BuzzFeed
News that he regrets both his role as an anonymous source and his
subsequent denial of his own involvement.
Davis told BuzzFeed News
that he did, in fact, speak anonymously to CNN for its story, which
cited “sources with knowledge” — meaning more than one person.
“I made a mistake,” Davis said. Regarding his comments about a month later to Cooper, he added, “I did not mean to be cute.”
After Davis publicly backtracked from the claims, the New York Post and the Washington Post
outed him as their confirming source and published apologies from
Davis, a lawyer and communications expert who became well known for his
work for Bill Clinton. The original CNN story — broadcast during Chris
Cuomo’s prime-time show and written by Jim Sciutto, Marshall Cohen, and
Watergate reporting legend Carl Bernstein — said that Davis had
“declined to comment.” His involvement in the story, on so-called
“background,” has not been previously reported.
After publication
of this story, Davis added to BuzzFeed News that he did not lie to
Cooper, but that he "unintentionally misspoke."
"We stand by our story, and are confident in our reporting of it,” a CNN spokesperson told BuzzFeed News.
The
unfolding saga around CNN’s July report highlights an uncomfortable
reality for reporters in the Trump era — about the pitfalls of anonymous
sourcing, the dangers of the reliance on capricious narrators, and what
it means for news outlets when the backstory can matter as much as the
story.
As Trump-Russia bombshells often do, the story sparked a
dash from media competitors to confirm the news. One by one — from NBC
News to CBS News to the Washington Post — they did. When another outlet
breaks a story, reporters tend to call up the requisite spokesperson to
ask for comment. In this case, that spokesperson was Davis. BuzzFeed
News wrote an article
about CNN’s story, citing reporting from CNN and NBC News. (Neither
Cohen nor his lawyers responded for comment for that BuzzFeed News
story.)
Even for the uninitiated Trump-Russia reader, CNN’s
article appeared a clear message from the beleaguered Cohen team to the
special counsel’s office. The story went a step further than just
Cohen’s personal knowledge: Cohen, CNN’s sources said, was willing to
make his claim to special counsel Robert Mueller. The article came amid
the storm of legal troubles for the embattled Cohen, who weeks later
pleaded guilty to eight federal crimes stemming from a separate
investigation led by the US attorney’s office for the Southern District
of New York.
CNN’s story was made all the more convincing thanks
to the series of mainstream media rivals “matching” elements of the
account, thanks in large part to Davis, who had requested and received
anonymity to confirm that CNN’s reporting was accurate. Trump, for his
part, tweeted that he did not have prior knowledge about the meeting.
His lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, sought to knock down the report, as did Trump
Jr.
About a month later, Cohen pleaded guilty
to criminal charges, including campaign finance violations. Freed from
self-imposed media silence, Davis began making the TV rounds to defend
his client. He appeared across cable news and said that Cohen had
information that would be of interest to Mueller, including what Trump
knew of Russian hacking. But Davis’s complicated role in the Trump Tower
story was about to become apparent after he appeared on CNN with
Cooper.
The host pressed Davis on a statement issued by Sens.
Richard Burr and Mark Warner of the Senate Select Committee on
Intelligence. The statement said that Cohen had told the committee in a
sworn testimony that he learned of the Trump Tower meeting when it was
reported in July of last year. Cooper asked how Cohen’s statement to the
committee could be true if he also had prior knowledge of Trump’s
awareness of the meeting.
Davis responded that Cohen did not have
any knowledge that Trump knew about the meeting. Davis has since told
multiple outlets, including BuzzFeed News, that the Cohen camp could not
seek to correct the CNN story at the time because it was in the midst
of a criminal investigation.
But Davis’s media tour set in motion
his outing as a confirming source for other outlets following the Trump
Tower story. Davis said he should have been much more clear to reporters
that he did not personally know the information was accurate. “I’m glad
to take ownership of the mistake. Now I’m taking the heat, and it’s
justified,” Davis told BuzzFeed News.
CNN’s decision to stand by
the story has irked some staffers inside the network, which has taken
strong action on errors in the past, forcing out three employees last summer over a bungled Trump-Russia article.
The
network, in effect, doesn’t appear to believe it made a mistake — the
story was, some inside CNN argue, carefully worded to hedge against
those in the Cohen camp changing their tune. In other words, the story
reports claims that Cohen had said he was willing to make, not the underlying truth of those claims.
The
decision from CNN to continue to stand by the story suggests that it
believes the strength of its other sources outweighs any waffling from
Davis — or that the network believes Davis was telling the truth then,
and not now. But Davis’s new statement that he was a source for a story
he now refutes raises questions about what action, if any, the network
might take.
“We should address Lanny Davis’s comments in our
reporting and be more transparent with our readers about our reporting,”
one CNN staffer told BuzzFeed News.
In recent days, conservative outlets such as the Daily Caller have hammered
the network, claiming that Davis’s public admission of his involvement
in confirming the story amounts to a debunking of the original story.
The Daily Caller also criticized CNN host Brian Stelter for not asking Bernstein to defend the report when he appeared on the network’s weekly media show.
Davis’s
role in the CNN story also offers a window into the kind of anonymous
sourcing common across newsrooms. Some news outlets have a policy to not
let sources speak “on background” — that is, as a “person familiar with
the matter” or some other unnamed moniker — and also be allowed to
decline to comment on the record.
In practice, however, reporters
and sources often find a good degree of wiggle room, maneuvering that
covers for anonymous sources but can also deceive readers over the
provenance of information.
Reporters will sometimes offer sources
inelegant solutions, like allowing someone to decline to comment on a
specific matter so as to allow them to become a background source on
another piece of information the story. In the Washington Post’s case,
for instance, Davis had declined to comment on the record, though he
appeared as an anonymous source in the same story.
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