NBC News Issues Major Correction in Michael Cohen 'Wiretap' Report, President Trump Weighs In

NBC News misreported a major detail in the ongoing case against President Trump's lawyer, Michael [...]

By Michael Hein

NBC News misreported a major detail in the ongoing case against President Trump's lawyer, Michael Cohen on Thursday, and the outlet was forced to issue a correction.

At 1 p.m. on Thursday, NBC News and MSNBC reported that federal investigators had placed a wiretap on Cohen's phone lines, which would allow them to listen in on his phone calls. The outlet cited two trusted sources on this information.

However, at 5:27 p.m., they added a correction to the story, specifying that agents had obtained a pen-register of Cohen's phone lines, not a wiretap. This means that they can't actively listen in on what is said in Cohen's phone calls, but they can keep track of who Cohen spoke to, when calls were made and where they originated from.

The distinction was significant, and it also provided President Trump with more ammunition for his attack on the media. He went after NBC News on Twitter again, apparently feeling vindicated by the misreport.

"NBC NEWS is wrong again!" he wrote. "They cite 'sources' which are constantly wrong. Problem is, like so many others, the sources probably don't exist, they are fabricated, fiction! NBC, my former home with the Apprentice, is now as bad as Fake News CNN. Sad!"

NBC News and MSNBC made a point of clarifying the correction at length. In addition to updating the article, the story occupied several minutes of coverage on Meet the Press Daily, where reporters Tom Winter and Chuck Todd explained how they had received false information.

Three unnamed senior U.S. officials contacted NBC to dispute the claim of wiretapping. While Winter said that the two sources where the original story had come from had a long record of reliability, they accepted the correction.

"It's still a very serious matter," Winter said.

ABC News was also forced to correct, after tweeting in the afternoon that their sources had confirmed the wiretap story.

President Trump's new lawyer, Rudi Giuliani, denied the wiretapping story before it was corrected. He spoke with reporters from The Daily Beast, saying that he believed someone in the Justice Department had handed out false information.

"Us lawyers have talked about it, we don't believe it's true," he said. "We think it's going to turn out to be untrue because it would be totally illegal. You can't wiretap a lawyer, you certainly can't wiretap his client who's not involved in the investigation. No one has suggested that Trump was involved in that investigation. So they're going to wiretap the lawyer, his client, and his client the president of the United States?"

"I don't think so, not if they want to stay out of jail," he continued. "Disclosing a wiretap is a federal felony. I never took 'em home when I was a U.S. attorney."

0comments
Start the Conversation

of