CNN anchor Jake Tapper fired back at President Donald Trump after the president accused CNN of knowingly propagating fake news.
The network featured around-the-clock coverage on Tuesday of Trump’s backdown on his threat to obliterate Iran, including sharing a statement from Iran’s Supreme National Security Council on the two-week ceasefire.
During the Tuesday edition of OutFront, CNN’s Erin Burnett read part of its statement on-air. “The enemy, in its unfair, unlawful, and criminal war against the Iranian nation, has suffered an undeniable, historic, and crushing defeat,” it read.
Burnett also discussed a shorter statement issued by Iran’s Foreign Minister, Seyed Abbas Araghchi, that Trump himself shared on social media.
Trump responded to the segment with two Truth Social posts, accusing the network of sourcing the statement from a “fake news site.” He added that authorities were investigating whether it had committed a crime by doing so.
“CNN is being ordered to immediately withdraw this Statement with full apologies for their, as usual, terrible ‘reporting,’” the president wrote. “Results of the investigation will be announced in the near future.”
In a second post, published just before midnight, Trump continued to criticize CNN, writing, “No one can believe that Fake News CNN put out a knowingly false and dangerous statement pretending it came from the upper levels of the Iranian Government.”
“CNN just got caught cheating - A very dangerous thing to do!”
Responding to the president’s posts on Wednesday night, Tapper hit back, accusing Trump of falsely claiming that the network had lied to its viewers.
“The issue boils down to this,” Tapper told viewers of The Lead with Jake Tapper. “The statement from Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, which claimed victory for Iran, did not fit the messaging that the Trump administration wanted to project. And instead of calling out the Iranian regime for its conflicting statements or explaining how Iran does this all the time, President Trump attacked CNN by falsely claiming we made it up by lying to you.”
“We didn‘t make it up, nor did we present any of Iran‘s narratives as fact,” he continued. “We simply presented what the statement said in the context of the rest of the war, and that is our job as journalists to report on what is happening in a war.“
“Our job is not to try and please the president or only report the statements he likes. We‘re going to tell you what‘s going on, and we‘re going to keep doing that, no matter how many lies this administration or the Iranians tell.”
CNN reporter Matthew Chance clarified on Tuesday evening that multiple statements were sent by Iran.
“There’s a very short one from the Iranian foreign ministry basically saying, look, we’re going to observe a ceasefire and open the Strait of Hormuz,” Chance told Anderson Cooper.
“The second document, the one apparently President Trump seems to be objecting to, is the one sent to us by The Supreme National Security Council of Iran,” Chance continued.
“That’s Iran’s highest military body. And that’s a lot more aggressive. And it goes into a lot more detail about what that 10-point plan to end the war from Iran actually involves.”
In a statement to the Daily Beast made after the president’s initial post, a spokesperson for CNN stood by its reporting, adding that “the statement in question was obtained by CNN from Iranian officials and reported on multiple Iranian state media outlets. We received the statement from specific official Iranian spokespeople who are known to us.”
The Daily Beast has contacted the White House for comment.
