Donald Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway bashed CNN for another news organization’s story on Wednesday night, hours after her boss lambasted the cable network as “fake news.”
The president-elect’s senior adviser, during an interview with Anderson Cooper, railed against CNN and its story Tuesday night that said Trump had been presented with a report that claimed Russian spies had collected compromising personal information on him. CNN’s report, citing unnamed U.S. officials, didn’t link to the documents and noted the allegations are unconfirmed.
Conway said she knew “CNN must be feeling the heat” and denied Trump had been presented with the intelligence. “That is just false,” she claimed.
CNN, the first to report the story, was quickly followed by other news organizations. BuzzFeed was among the few major outlets that published the 35-page dossier’s unsubstantiated claims.
Cooper specifically asked if Trump had seen a two-page summary of the report in an intelligence briefing last week, but Conway didn’t answer, saying she wasn’t in the meeting. She went on to conflate CNN’s reporting with BuzzFeed’s.
“We didn’t report what BuzzFeed reported,” Cooper said, clarifying that CNN did not publish the dossier.
“I certainly would not have dumped all this unsubstantiated allegations. I think it’s unfair,” Cooper said later in the segment.
“But now that it’s out there, CNN’s all to happy to refer to it, aren’t you?” Conway said.
“We’re not reporting it, no. We’ve mentioned none of it on the air, we have not talked about any details on the air,” Cooper said.
Trump refused to take a question from CNN reporter Jim Acosta at his press conference Wednesday, pointing at the reporter and yelling, “You are fake news!” Acosta said later on CNN that incoming White House press secretary Sean Spicer also appeared to lump together the reporting of CNN and BuzzFeed.
Watch the exchange above.
