NBC News was forced to issue an embarrassing correction Thursday evening after the network falsely reported that Trump attorney Michael Cohen had been the subject of a court-order wiretap of his phones.
It turns out that the feds had only recorded logs of call records and not the actual substance of the calls themselves — a pretty big difference.
“Earlier today, NBC News reported that there was a wiretap on the phones of Michael Cohen, President Trump’s longtime personal attorney, citing two separate sources with knowledge of the legal proceedings involving Cohen,” blared a correction to the original NBC report by Tom Winter and Julia Ainsley.
“But three senior U.S. officials now dispute that, saying that the monitoring of Cohen’s phones was limited to a log of calls, known as a pen register, not a wiretap where investigators can actually listen to calls.”
The flagellation continued — at least for Winters — later that day after the reporter was sent onto MSNBC’s “Meet The Press” to account for the error.
CORRECTION: Feds have pen-register, not wiretap on Michael Cohen pic.twitter.com/gXLckdKPeX
— MSNBC (@MSNBC) May 3, 2018
And the pain continued into Friday after President Trump used the incident to attack NBC as fake news and accused the company of fabricating the sources behind the reporting.
“NBC NEWS is wrong again! They cite “sources” which are constantly wrong,” said Trump “Problem is, like so many others, the sources probably don’t exist, they are fabricated, fiction! NBC, my former home with the Apprentice, is now as bad as Fake News CNN. Sad!”
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/992354530510721025?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.thewrap.com%2Ftrump-unloads-on-nbc-after-michael-cohen-correction-the-sources-probably-dont-exist%2F&tfw_creator=levinejonathan&tfw_site=thewrap
NBC News declined to comment on the accusation.