On Wednesday, CNN political analyst John Avlon quipped that he wasn’t sure if Donald Trump was a “presidential candidate or PR agent for WikiLeaks,” because the candidate pushed the WikiLeaks revelations about Hillary Clinton in 2016.
WikiLeaks has become the topic du jour in the wake of the Guardian‘s contested report that former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort met with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange shortly before he joined the Trump team. Both Manafort and WikiLeaks have vehemently contested the report, and WikiLeaks has threatened to file a libel suit against the paper.
Yet more WikiLeaks news broke Tuesday. Jerome Corsi, an ally of Roger Stone, claimed to CNN that on the day the “Access Hollywood” tapes came out, Stone asked him three times to reach out to WikiLeaks and ask the outlet to release the dirt it had collected on Hillary Clinton. WikiLeaks did indeed release the emails of Clinton campaign manager John Podesta.
Stone has vehemently denied this story.
While the truth has yet to come out, that did not stop CNN from suggesting that Trump somehow convinced WikiLeaks to dump its Podesta emails. The outlet ran a 24-second montage of Trump drawing attention to the WikiLeaks dump.
At that point, Avlon suggested that Trump was a “PR agent for WikiLeaks.”
Host Alisyn Camerota chimed in, “I don’t know.”
It may come out that Trump’s campaign somehow convinced WikiLeaks to drop those emails on the same day as the “Access Hollywood” tape came out — and that would indeed be a major scandal. As of yet, this is far from confirmed.
As usual, CNN rushed to release a montage suggesting that Trump was engaged in this sort of scandal.
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