Congressman Doug Collins Says CNN Should Be Investigated over 'Disturbing' Spy Story
Out of all the questions raised by this week’s report from CNN about a highly placed CIA mole in Moscow, Rep. Doug Collins might have asked the best one.
Even if it was also the most obvious.
In an appearance Tuesday on Fox News’ “America’s Newsroom,” Collins put it plainly:
“Whose side is CNN on?”
Collins, the ranking Republican on the House Judiciary Committee, was referring to Monday’s CNN report that alleged the CIA decided to remove a valuable spy from Moscow because of concerns about President Donald Trump’s handling of sensitive information.
The report was contradicted not only by the CIA, which called it “misguided” and “simply false,” but also by The New York Times, which published a report Monday that contained elements directly rebutting claims made by CNN.
(The New York Times, such a mainstay of the anti-Trump resistance that it will change a front-page headline if it’s not anti-Trump enough, can hardly be considered a mouthpiece for the administration.)
Collins’ question was one many Americans have been asking since even before the dawn of President Donald Trump’s administration but it’s achieved a new urgency in the past three years.
The network’s reflexively liberal reporting has always been monotonously predictable, but in the Trump era, it has morphed into something that comes across almost maliciously anti-American.
“This is the same group that hired Andy McCabe, who is one of the disastrous parts of the cabal that started to get the president, as a commentator,” Collins told Fox.
“To put this out at this time, and to put it in such a way that the CIA had to come out and respond to this is really a disturbing point.
“I really question, ‘Whose side is CNN on?'”
Check it out here. The whole segment is worth watching, but the first three minutes are devoted to the Democrats’ slow-walking “impeachment” campaign against Trump.
The segment on the CNN report starts about the 3:06 mark.
Collins told his Fox News interviewers CNN’s report should be investigated.
That’s an idea that isn’t likely to go far — the First Amendment will always protect the American media, even major outsets seem determined to destroy their own credibility by abusing it.
But his Fox interview did raise the important question.
At a time when trust in traditional American institutions is so badly eroded, why would a once-respectable news network lower itself to “reporting” that seems intended to do nothing other than damage the credibility of the current president, at whatever cost that might be to the country or its interests?
By the second paragraph of its Monday report, CNN was attempting to smear President Trump as a danger to American national security.
It was a claim so baseless even The Times apparently felt called upon to dispute.
When The Times and the Trump CIA are on the same side for a change, it can’t help but force the question:
Seriously, whose side is CNN on, anyway?
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