A seemingly frustrated Jake Tapper was caught on a hot mic during a special edition of “The Lead” on Friday — and Anderson Cooper attempted to step in and mitigate the situation.
In a clip making the rounds online, CNN’s guest John King said, “Only if they announced a total ceasefire, air, land, ground, would that be acceptable to Ukraine? Otherwise, we’re going to keep going and keep going, but we’re going to know in a few minutes,” before Cooper added, “Let’s go back to Jake in Anchorage. Jake?”
“I’m fine. Just give me my show back!” Tapper was caught saying before Cooper jumped back in with, “The show’s back!”
A startled Tapper continued, “All right, here we go. So, let’s go now to Senator Schiff who we have here. Senator Schiff is joining me, ready to go in — the senator — the Democratic senator from California.”
Tapper was anchoring live from Alaska as Donald Trump welcomed Vladmir Putin to the United States Friday; Cooper was anchoring in Washington, D.C., and multiple control rooms were involved in what turned out to be a simple technical problem.
“We’re having real comms problems today. I’m sorry about that. If anybody can hear me, let’s go throw it back to New York,” Tapper noted later in the broadcast.
During a segment on MSNBC the same day, Foreign Policy editor-in-chief and MSNBC contributor Ravi Agrawal and host Katy Tur mocked Trump for rolling out a “literal red carpet” for Russia’s president.
“That way that he embraces and lights up when he sees Vladimir Putin, [who is] not our ally, who we have a hostile relationship with, is so different, and I think it’s so hard to understand,” Tur said.
“If you are any leader anywhere in the world right now, you’re looking at this and you see two things,” Agrawal added. “One is that the rules don’t matter. Friendships don’t matter, democracy doesn’t matter.”
