CNN has issued a correction to a Friday morning exclusive about documents that Donald Trump Jr. received from WikiLeaks after The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and NBC News contradicted its original story.
The new reports said Trump Jr. and other campaign officials had received an email pointing them to the WikiLeaks documents on the afternoon of Sept. 14 — after they had already been made public.
The original CNN report said Trump Jr. had received the email on Sept. 4, before WikiLeaks had made the documents public.
{mosads}It also noted that on the same day, Donald Jr. began tweeting about WikiLeaks and Hillary Clinton.
CNN ran a correction, changed its headline and removed a tweet from Trump Jr. from Sept. 4 in acknowledging the error.
“Correction: This story has been corrected to say the date of the email was September 14, 2016, not September 4, 2016. The story also changed the headline and removed a tweet from Donald Trump Jr., who posted a message about WikiLeaks on September 4, 2016,” the correction reads.
The wording of the CNN story was also changed to reflect the differences.
“After this story was published, The Washington Post obtained a copy of the email Friday afternoon and reported that the email urged Trump and his campaign to download archives that WikiLeaks had made public a day earlier. The story suggested that the individual may simply have been trying to flag the campaign to already public documents.”
“The new details appear to show that the sender was relying on publicly available information,” CNN said in its updated story. “The new information indicates that the communication is less significant than CNN initially reported.”
CNN said its original story had been based on two sources who had seen the email.
The CNN story is a blow to media outlets that have come under criticism for false reports about President Trump and his campaign.
Trump frequently criticizes the media and has specifically gone after CNN as “fake news.” Trump Jr. responded to the developments on Twitter before the correction was made.
“I know you can’t help but spread #fakenews @cnn, but now that you know the truth you should have the decency to retract the false story, make the correction, take down the bs tweet, and apologize to the 2 or 3 people that still believe you to be credible,” Trump Jr. wrote with the hashtag #yourewelcome