Well, the House Intelligence Committee hearings on President Trump’s impeachment might be over, but for CNN, it’s battle now faces a second front: the committee’s ranking member, Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA). Nunes became a target of CNN who published a story that an associate of Rudy Giuliani, an attorney for the president, is ready to detail a tall tale about him meeting Nunes in Vienna in an effort to get “dirt” on former Vice President Joe Biden. Gee—this story sounds so familiar, maybe it’s a throwback to that fantastic tale about Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen being in Prague when he wasn’t. These clowns never learn do they (via CNN):
A lawyer for an indicted associate of Rudy Giuliani tells CNN that his client is willing to tell Congress about meetings the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee had in Vienna last year with a former Ukrainian prosecutor to discuss digging up dirt on Joe Biden.The attorney, Joseph A. Bondy, represents Lev Parnas, the recently indicted Soviet-born American who worked with Giuliani to push claims of Democratic corruption in Ukraine. Bondy said that Parnas was told directly by the former Ukrainian official that he met last year in Vienna with Rep. Devin Nunes.[…]Bondy tells CNN that his client and Nunes began communicating around the time of the Vienna trip. Parnas says he worked to put Nunes in touch with Ukrainians who could help Nunes dig up dirt on Biden and Democrats in Ukraine, according to Bondy.That information would likely be of great interest to House Democrats given its overlap with the current impeachment inquiry into President Trump, and could put Nunes in a difficult spot.Bondy tells CNN his client is willing to comply with a Congressional subpoena for documents and testimony as part of the impeachment inquiry in a manner that would allow him to protect his Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination.Bondy suggested in a tweet on Friday that he was already speaking to House Intel though the committee declined to comment.
Yeah, the ‘Cohen in Prague’ story was fake. And this appears to be total trash as well, with Nunes announcing that he will be slapping CNN with a lawsuit. Daily Wire has more, including a lengthy history of CNN just being an abjectly terrible network that can’t seem to stop peddling fake news about Republicans and President Donald Trump (via Daily Wire):
House Intelligence Committee Ranking Member Devin Nunes (R-CA) announced Friday night that he is filing a lawsuit against CNN over a report that they published the same evening that alleged an indicted associate of Rudy Giuliani was willing to testify to Congress that Nunes met with a former Ukrainian prosecutor last year to discuss digging up dirt on former Vice President and current Democrat presidential candidate Joe Biden.[…]Nunes also plans to sue The Daily Beast for a story that it published earlier in the week that alleged that Parnas helped Nunes set up numerous meetings regarding Ukraine.In an exclusive statement provided to Breitbart News, Nunes said: “These demonstrably false and scandalous stories published by the Daily Beast and CNN are the perfect example of defamation and reckless disregard for the truth. Some political operative offered these fake stories to at least five different media outlets before finding someone irresponsible enough to publish them. I look forward to prosecuting these cases, including the media outlets, as well as the sources of their fake stories, to the fullest extent of the law. I intend to hold the Daily Beast and CNN accountable for their actions. They will find themselves in court soon after Thanksgiving.”[…]CNN… is notorious for making false claims about Republicans and publishing false stories that later have to be retracted.In late 2017, CNN published a story smearing then-Trump ally Anthony Scaramucci that alleged that Scaramucci was connected to a Russian investment fund that was supposedly under investigation by the U.S. Senate.Scaramucci took immediate legal action against CNN and the network was forced to retract the report and had to fire three reporters over the incident.In August, CNN’s Brian Stelter, on his show “Reliable Sources,” allowed a psychiatrist to falsely claim that President Donald Trump was “as destructive of person in this century as Hitler, Stalin, Mao were in the last century. He may be responsible for many more million deaths than they were.”
This story is going to get CNN in a whole lot of trouble. Deliberately peddling fake news from Fusion GPS that nobody else would publish because it’s so baseless? Garbage journalism, but classic CNN. We’re talking “Michael Cohen in Prague” level fabulism. https://t.co/Oc14jyoGIM— Sean Davis (@seanmdav) November 23, 2019
CNN does well in keeping its reputation as one of the prolific anti-Trump networks out there—but that doesn’t shield them from legal trouble. James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas did a lengthy investigation into the bias at the network, where it’s a known fact that its president, Jeffrey Zucker, has a personal vendetta against Trump. Well, here’s your finished product.
The Trump-Ukraine fiasco continues to engulf the Democratic Party and its allies in the media. In all, the Hill wasted all week hauling up so-called witnesses over this July phone call Trump had with Ukrainian leaders, where he allegedly threatened to withhold aid unless they investigated the corruption allegations lobbed at Hunter Biden, son of Joe Biden, and his board position at Burisma energy company. So far, there's been zero evidence to back up that claim. It's all been hearsay and a lot of presumptions.