In their attempt to revive the dying Russia-Trump narrative CNN botched a giant story.
A 2016 email sent to candidate Donald Trump and top aides pointed the campaign to hacked documents from the Democratic National Committee that had already been made public by the group WikiLeaks a day earlier.
The email — sent the afternoon of Sept. 14, 2016 — noted that “Wikileaks has uploaded another (huge 678 mb) archive of files from the DNC†and included a link and a “decryption key,†according to a copy obtained by The Washington Post.
The writer, who said his name was Michael J. Erickson and described himself as the president of an aviation management company, sent the message to the then-Republican nominee as well as his eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., and other top advisers.
The day before, WikiLeaks had tweeted links to what the group said was 678.4 megabytes of DNC documents.
The full email — which was first described to CNN as being sent on Sept. 4, 10 days earlier — indicates that the writer may have simply been flagging information that was already widely available. CNN later corrected its story to note the email had been sent Sept. 14.
If you’re wondering why this is a huge deal I’ll explain. Basically, this shows us that Donald Trump and his campaign not only had zero ties to the Russians who hacked these but they also played no part in delivering these emails to Wiki Leaks. The entire collusion narrative is surrounding Donald Trump and the Russians working together to hack the DNC. Why would they try and contact them to view the emails if they worked on hacking the DNC? Why would they wait for the emails to already be made public before looking at them? I’ll tell you why. Donald Trump and his campaign had nothing to do with the hacking of the DNC and they certainly had no plans of colluding with Russia.