Jake Tapper Claims He “Misspoke” As CNN Spreads Michigan Attorney General’s Bald-Faced Lie about Rashida Tlaib

By Jacob Weindling  |  September 24, 2024 | 3:15pm
Photo by Jemal Countess/Getty Images for The Atlantic
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Jake Tapper Claims He “Misspoke” As CNN Spreads Michigan Attorney General’s Bald-Faced Lie about Rashida Tlaib

Michigan Democratic Attorney General Dana Nessel recently told a lie about a publicly available quote from Rep. Rashida Tlaib who was criticizing her for charging pro-Palestinian protesters with crimes. Nessel said that “Rashida should not use my religion to imply I cannot perform my job fairly as Attorney General. It’s anti-Semitic and wrong.”

Here is the quote from Rashida Tlaib that Nessel is seemingly referencing, from a Detroit Metro Times interview:

“We’ve had the right to dissent, the right to protest. We’ve done it for climate, the immigrant rights movement, for Black lives and even around issues of injustice among water shutoffs. But it seems that the attorney general decided if the issue was Palestine, she was going to treat it differently, and that alone speaks volumes about possible biases within the agency she runs…I think people at the University of Michigan put pressure on her to do this, and she fell for it.”

There is no mystery as to what allegations Rashida Tlaib was making in this quote. It’s crystal clear that she looks to the University of Michigan as the undue influence here. To charge her with a personal antisemitic attack over pointing out inconsistencies in the Michigan Attorney General’s office’s charges is just wrong, and personally as a Jew it dismays me to see our religion be weaponized like this over and over again in bad faith attacks. These kinds of lies make actual antisemitism much harder to call out in the future.

CNN’s Jake Tapper, someone who is no stranger to misconstruing allegations from powerful biased actors as fact, asked Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer about the AG’s charges of people at “anti-Israel protests,” as he chose to characterize them.

He cited a lie, a quote Tlaib never said as the Detroit Metro Times highlighted in their fact check, throwing it at the Michigan governor, falsely asserting that “Congresswoman Tlaib is suggesting that [Nessel] shouldn’t be prosecuting these individuals that Nessel says broke the law, and that she’s only doing it because she’s Jewish.”

Steve Neavling, the Detroit Metro Times reporter who published the quote from Rep. Tlaib, flat-out called Jake Tapper and CNN a bunch of liars for this complete and utter abdication of basic journalistic principles while elevating a smear against Congress’s only Palestinian American.

I reached out to CNN for comment on this, and they replied off the record, but they did point me to this segment with Jake Tapper where at the 2:56 mark, he said to Dana Nessel, “I should note that I misspoke yesterday when asking a follow up of Governor Whitmer who I asked about this. I was trying to characterize your views of Tlaib’s comments. What do you make of those today noting that Congresswoman Tlaib never explicitly said your bias was because of your religion and so it’s unfair for you to make that allegation?”

Good start! Now to take a big sip of coffee and check all of Jake Tapper’s and CNN’s social media accounts where I assume they must have pushed this correction–er, clarification of Tapper’s misspeaking, if that’s what you want to pretend it is–wide and far in order to undo the damage they did spreading the lie!

Hmmm…weird. Nothing on Tapper’s feed, he still does have Whitmer’s quote based on his lie posted though. Maybe his show, State of the Union will have it…nope. They did share his initial interview with Whitmer where he raised the lie about Rep. Tlaib though. What about Tapper’s co-Anchor, Dana Bash? She didn’t share Tapper’s quote that he misspoke either. CNN anchor Bianna Golodryga also elevated this lie, calling it “disturbing,” yet she also has not shared Tapper’s new quote.

The top video on CNN’s State of the Union website as of publication is the Tapper interview with Governor Whitmer where he elevates this lie about Rep. Tlaib, but the interview with Dana Nessel where Tapper says he “misspoke” is nowhere to be found. There is nothing on CNN’s YouTube page about any of this either. The only place I have been able to find Tapper’s quote is this SnapStream clip I was directed to, and a non-CNN journalist clipping it.

Nessel’s retort to Tapper correctly pointing out that she is mischaracterizing Tlaib’s quote was similar to JD Vance admitting to CNN he just lies based on things he believes, as Nessel responded that “Rashida Tlaib is an individual who is well-known for making inflammatory and incendiary remarks that are antisemitic in nature, so this isn’t the first time that we would have heard these words out of her mouth. I think it’s very clear to everybody exactly what she was saying.”

One would assume that a journalist who was effectively just called a liar by their subject would push back, asserting as Tapper did in his question that in fact, “Congresswoman Tlaib never explicitly said that your bias was because of your religion.”

But this clearly isn’t a journalistic endeavor, this is the stenography hour with Jake Tapper, so after covering his ass midway through an interview no CNN media organ is promoting, he called it a day and did not push back at all against Nessel rejecting the factual premise of his question. He even later characterized it as a “disagreement” in the interview, further giving credence to the lie he just performatively called out.

To give CNN but definitely not Jake Tapper some mild credit, after letting the lie spread nearly unabated for about 24 hours, Dana Bash issued a “clarification,” publishing part of Tlaib’s accurate quote but still ending the segment with Nessel’s false characterization of the words they just “clarified” while leaving out the fact that Tlaib’s specific charge was Nessel caved to demands from people at the University of Michigan.

As of publication, Jake Tapper, the source of this falsehood in the initial line of questioning that set off this firestorm, has not shared this “clarification” on his social media despite posting about his beloved Philadelphia Eagles since it went up, while Dana Bash has, but it is not on CNN’s State of the Union website or any of their social accounts outside Bash’s show Inside Politics. The only other CNN anchor who has shared the “clarification” as of publication is Bianna Golodryga.

Clarification and misspeaking are extremely charitable descriptions of what happened here, to say the least. Jewish Insider, a publication run by the conservative media operative Josh Kraushaar, produced a fabricated charge, then quietly edited it from Tlaib “claimed” to “suggested,” and Tapper likely elevated this lie on CNN instead of the reporting done by actual reporters, which gives you a window into how that man sees journalism.

This whole mess is a great example how easily much of the media can be tricked into pushing debunked claims in service of their own egos and agendas. Their desire to always market themselves as fair and balanced opens them up to bad faith liars exploiting that self-branding exercise for personal gain. Even in CNN’s “clarification,” they still made sure to elevate Nessel’s lie about Tlaib’s quote and failed to produce a key detail from it that directly contradicts Nessel’s claims, proving that this is not about correcting a falsehood, but keeping up the façade that Jake Tapper and Dana Bash are supposedly respectable journalists. What Dana Nessel is doing is right out of the Trump playbook, and over the last 24 hours, Jake Tapper and CNN have proven that it still works.

 
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