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Donald Trump Jr., pictured in December 2016. (Eduardo Munoz Alvarez/AFP/Getty Images)
A one-digit mistake by CNN on Friday armed President Trump with new ammunition for another fusillade against the media. Hours later, the president fired away at a rally in Pensacola, Fla.
“CNN apologized just a little while ago,” Trump gloated. “They apologized. Oh, thank you, CNN. Thank you so much. You should’ve been apologizing for the last two years.”
CNN reported Friday morning that Donald Trump Jr. received an email on Sept. 4, 2016, that granted special access to WikiLeaks documents. The network said in an online article that the email had been “described to CNN by multiple sources.”
But The Washington Post obtained the email itself and reported Friday afternoon that the message was actually dated Sept. 14, 2016 — a difference that sets Trump Jr.’s receipt 10 days later.
The date matters. CNN’s report indicated that the Trump campaign had been fed hacked email files belonging to the Democratic National Committee and former secretary of state Colin Powell more than a week before the files were released publicly.
“Interestingly,” CNN reporter Manu Raju said on the air, “the same day that Donald Trump Jr. received this email was the first time that he appears to have tweeted about WikiLeaks.”
CNN presented the timing of Trump Jr.’s tweet as a possible reason to doubt his claim that he never even saw the email.
The later email date reported by The Post means that Trump Jr.’s first tweet about WikiLeaks could not have been prompted by the email, since the president’s eldest son did not receive the message until 10 days after tweeting.
More important, the later date means that the email did not provide the Trump campaign with early access to WikiLeaks documents after all. The DNC files shared with Trump Jr. via a link and a “decryption key” on Sept. 14, 2016, had been posted online and advertised on Twitter by WikiLeaks the day before. And the Powell files had been posted online hours before Trump Jr. received the email from a person who identified himself as Michael J. Erickson.
As The Post’s Rosalind S. Helderman and Tom Hamburger noted in their report on the correct date of the email, “the writer may have simply been flagging information that was already widely available.”
CNN issued a correction and a statement on Friday afternoon.
CNN’s report, though flawed, adds to previous reporting by the Atlantic that WikiLeaks called Trump Jr.’s attention to some of its disclosures through private Twitter exchanges and offered advice during and after the campaign. For example, WikiLeaks tipped off Trump Jr. to the launch of a political-action website opposing his father and provided a link, which Trump Jr. tweeted, that highlighted “many great stories the press are missing” in the hacked emails of Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta.
The wrong date in CNN’s report exaggerated the apparent coziness between the president’s team and WikiLeaks, however.
You could practically hear the cry of “fake news” building in President Trump’s lungs before he took the stage in Pensacola and let it rip.
The “fake news” label suggests intentional deception, but there is no evidence that this was anything but a mistake. Plus, The Post’s report on the true date of the email is an example of how the press often polices itself — contrary to conspiratorial notions of a “corrupt cabal,” as Sean Hannity calls the media.
Still, a week after ABC made an even bigger error that also involved the inaccurate reporting of an event’s timing, CNN’s slip-up played into Trump’s effort to cast the media as unreliable and out to get him.
“Did you see all the corrections the media’s been making?” Trump said Friday night. “They’ve been apologizing left and right. They took this fraudster from ABC — they suspended him for a month. They should have fired him for what he wrote.”
This post has been updated to include a statement from CNN and Trump’s remarks in Pensacola.
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The measure of a nation is how well we safeguard all children by offering the opportunity to thrive. Yet, in 2016, according to U.S. Census data, 28.7 million children lived in low-income families, or 200 percent of the poverty line; 13.2 million children lived in poverty; and 6.6 children lived in deep poverty, or below 50 percent of the poverty line.
At a time when too many children in our nation are living in or near poverty, income and wealth inequality is high, and mobility is a challenge, our nation should be investing more, not less, in the next generation. Yet, the House and Senate versions of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act jeopardize our nation’s children and in fact, leave many of them behind.
A new Quinnipiac University Poll, for example, finds the majority of American voters disapprove of the tax plan, including 60 percent of women voters and 62 percent of those ages 18-34.
To be clear, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act leaves children worse off due to its lopsided nature, harmful provisions, and overall damaging impact on children’s investments.
The bills would raise taxes on many lower and middle-income households, do little to nothing for poor and low-income families with children, and add $1.5 trillion to the nation’s debt during a time when our nation is already shortchanging children’s investments, making it harder to fund important state and local programs and services that benefit children.
While the disproportionate impacts of the bills are well known, what is less well known is that even proposals that are championed as middle-class and pro-family leave many children behind. The expansion of the Child Tax Credit (CTC), for example, in the House and Senate bills would benefit higher-earning families, but leave millions of children in low- to moderate-income families out entirely or provide them with only modest benefits.
In fact, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimates millions of children in working families would receive only a token or partial CTC increase under the Senate bill, with some 10 million children in low-income working families receiving just $75 or less, while a family with two children earning $500,000 would become newly eligible for a $4,000 tax credit.
This omission is not only harmful but shortsighted, as research shows that these are the very children for whom a CTC boost would likeliest improve their odds of being healthy, doing well in school, going to college, and earning more in adulthood. The bills also penalize an estimated 1 million young Dreamers and their families by denying them the CTC.
Research has also shown that income assistance, nutrition assistance, and health care all have positive impacts on children’s longer-term health and education outcomes. Early learning, quality K-12 schools, and access to college are all essential to helping children achieve their full potential. However, the bill undermines children’s services and programs.
State and locally funded programs and services for children, including education, health care, and child care, are at risk due to changes to the federal tax deduction for state and local taxes, which may make it harder for states and localities to raise the resources needed to support these efforts.
Rising deficits — made $1.5 trillion larger by a deficit-increasing tax bill — will become the excuse for seeking deep cuts in children’s programs once Congress and the administration again turn their attention to reducing the deficit. Indeed, House Speaker Paul RyanPaul Davis RyanMcConnell names Senate GOP tax conferees House Republican: ‘I worry about both sides’ of the aisle on DACA Overnight Health Care: 3.6M signed up for ObamaCare in first month | Ryan pledges ‘entitlement reform’ next year | Dems push for more money to fight opioids MORE and others have indicated in recent weeks their intention to turn to spending cuts next year.
Both the administration’s 2018 Budget and the 2018 Congressional Budget Resolutions already called for extremely deep cuts in areas critical to children’s well-being and future opportunities, including health care through Medicaid, basic nutrition assistance through SNAP, other income assistance programs such as aid for children with disabilities, and funding for non-defense discretionary programs, which could include deep cuts in housing, education and college aid, to name just a few.
The last time Congress focused on addressing the debt, Congress passed the Budget Control Act (BCA) which resulted in budget caps and sequestration, leaving many children’s programs severely underfunded to this day.
There is bipartisan agreement that too many families struggle to get by, let alone get ahead. But this tax plan is not about helping these families — indeed, it will ultimately hurt them. If the potential harm of the tax plan on our nation’s children and families was not reason enough for members of Congress to vote against it, then they should know that poll after poll has shown that voters, by and large, overwhelmingly do not support this plan.
Members of Congress who care about America’s children should reject the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.
Lynette Fraga is chair of the board of the Children’s Leadership Council and the Executive Director of Child Care Aware of America.
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