Mollie Hemingway Says Jake Tapper Is 'Lying' About CNN's Key Role in the Russia Hoax, Drops Receipts

On this episode of "CNN... The Most Trusted Name in News"...

As my colleague Bob Hoge reported, Jake Tapper and CNN made the mistake of bringing Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance on Sunday's episode of "State of the Union," allegedly to talk about the upcoming election but really only to attempt to get Vance to agree that Trump is just like Adolf Hitler.

After the tense exchange had already started, Vance hit Tapper between the eyes with his and CNN's ad nauseam reporting about the Russia collusion hoax, as if it were true.

Vance: Now, Jake, we also should remember, I mean, step back a little bit. Well, ask yourself a basic question about network integrity. You guys talked about the Russia hoax nonstop.
Tapper: The FBI was investigating it. The FBI was investigating it! So, we -- so we covered them.
Vance: And so you took the words of unnamed FBI agents and put them on your network as if they were the gospel truth. You did it again and again. A viewer of your network would've believed that Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin conspired in 2016. Now that was totally and preposterously false.
Tapper: No. No! What you just said is false!

Over and over again Tapper defensively shrieked, "The FBI was investigating it" as CNN's reason for covering the propaganda. But Vance calmly finished Tapper off (emphasis, mine): "You covered it in a way that gave credence to anonymous sources, accusations. You did it yourself. Your network did it, Jake."

Tapper continued to deny Vance's charges, of course, perhaps protesting a bit too much. His vehement denials inspired Mollie Hemingway, editor-in-chief of The Federalist, to come forward and publish details of her interactions with Tapper and another key Russia hoax participant, Jim Sciutto, in January 2017.

On Tuesday Hemingway brought the hammer down on Tapper in an extremely detailed story about her experience on the CNN set on January 13, 2017, just a few days after Tapper and three of his CNN colleagues published "the most important story of the entire Russia collusion hoax." Her blunt headline:

Jake Tapper Is Lying About CNN's Key Role In The Russia Collusion Hoax

The veteran journalist eviscerated Tapper's claims about his -- and CNN's -- central role in the promotion of the debunked hoax. She begins:

On Jan. 12, 2017, I appeared on a CNN panel to discuss current events. It was memorable, and not just because we were taping from the roof of a building near the U.S. Capitol as part of the outlet’s special coverage of Trump’s first inauguration. Just as we were about to go on, we were significantly delayed by President Barack Obama surprising Vice President Joe Biden with a Presidential Medal of Freedom.
As I recall, there were maybe five or six of us on set, including former Obama political appointee Jim Sciutto and host Jake Tapper, two of the four authors of the most important story of the entire Russia collusion hoax. “Intel chiefs presented Trump with claims of Russian efforts to compromise him” had been published just two days prior, followed up by BuzzFeed publishing the actual document claiming widespread collusion between Trump and Russia.
That document — which nine months later was revealed to have been secretly bought and paid for by Hillary Clinton and the Democrat National Committee — included salacious lies about Trump supposedly paying prostitutes to urinate on a bed that the Obamas had slept in during a visit to a fancy Moscow hotel. The hysteria was such that many people wondered if Donald Trump would make it to the inauguration.

Clapper's "validation"

Hemingway writes that she was one of the few in Washington punditry circles who didn't either believe or pretend to believe that Trump colluded with Russia and that during the 2016 campaign, she thought Hillary Clinton's repeated refrains of "Russia, Russia, Russia" were silly. Yet Tapper and CNN, while not the Lone Rangers of the left-wing media, continued to push the Russia collusion story even as evidence that it was a hoax continued to pile up. Here's Mollie:

Evan Perez, a third co-author on the big story (Carl Bernstein being the fourth), did a report from a different location about a rare statement from known liar James Clapper, Obama’s Director of National Intelligence. In his statement, Clapper claimed to have been dismayed by the leaks that led to the CNN story and said he did “not believe the leaks came from within the IC,” meaning intelligence community.

Hemingway writes that Tapper and others interpreted Clapper's statement as validation of their story, then shared an interesting interaction between Tapper and Sciutto (who, remember, is one of the four co-authors of the CNN story):

While Perez’s package was airing, and at the point he read Clapper saying that he didn’t think the leak came from the intelligence community, Sciutto said that he was pretty sure Clapper knew the leak came from the intelligence community “because …,” he said, trailing off as he rolled his hands suggestively and somewhat like a football referee very slowly calling a false start. He said it for all to hear, though I’m not sure anyone else other than Jake Tapper, who he was sitting to the right of, and I heard and understood. Tapper squeezed Sciutto’s left wrist the way my mom used to squeeze my wrist at church when I was being too loud. I interpreted this message roughly as “stop talking you idiot.”
Sciutto was a former Obama administration political appointee in the State Department. It wasn’t clear if he was saying that Clapper had leaked to him or one of his three co-authors, a Clapper aide had leaked to CNN, or merely that Clapper knew Comey or one of his aides was leaking to CNN.

Now, obviously, Tapper knows that Hemingway is a conservative, but maybe her facial expressions between segments also gave her away, given what Tapper did next. According to Hemingway:

After we were done that day, Tapper came up to me on the roof — something he rarely did when I saw him at CNN — and told me that he really wanted to get me on his Sunday show. I perceived this as an attempt to keep me quiet about what I had witnessed. It failed, and I began writing immediately about how the dossier story was an information operation being fueled by top officials in the intelligence community. I published “Top-Level Intel Officers’ War Against Donald Trump Is Bad For The Country,” a few days later.
I was able to write that piece, as well as spend the next few years confidently fighting the Russia collusion hoax under unbelievable resistance, because of Jim Sciutto and Jake Tapper’s actions that day.

And, Jake?

Hemingway revealed why she hadn't shared this damning information previously, and why she's doing so now:

I need to explain why I’ve never told this story publicly before. During commercial breaks and while remote reporters are on air, people on television sets share personal stories, funny jokes, and information about stories they’re working on. I have long treated on-set interactions that are not broadcast as not to be discussed.

But in the same way that a reporter can publicly disclose an anonymous source who burns them with bad information, Tapper and CNN are causing serious harm to the country with their revisionist history of their own key role in the Russia collusion hoax. It’s become a matter of conscience that I stop hiding what I witnessed at CNN.
. . .
Tapper claimed, falsely, that all he and his colleagues did was report that the FBI was investigating the matter. He further claimed, falsely, that his viewers would not have been led to believe that Trump had conspired with Russia.

As I included, earlier in this article, Tapper continued to deny (lie) to Vance that he "took the words of unnamed FBI agents and put them on your network as if they were the gospel truth." "No," Tapper repeatedly said.

Hemingway's hammer fell once again:

Nothing Vance said was false, even if it understated the mendacity of CNN’s massive role in fanning the flames of the Russia collusion hoax.

Hemingway's extensive article continues with a masterful connect-the-dots of the actual collusion that occurred in 2016, 2017, and since - collusion between agents of the Obama administration, James Clapper, James Comey, and alleged journalists like Jake Tapper and his co-authors - and she succeeds in completely debunking Tapper's claims about CNN's role in the story.

This concludes today's episode of "CNN... The Most Trusted Name in News."

Editor's Note: This article was updated post-publication for clarity.