Thomas Frank, a reporter for ”CNN Investigates," last Thursday appeared to have a compelling exclusive on the story of the year. The Senate Intelligence Committee, reported Frank, was investigating a Russian investment fund — the Direct Investment Fund (RDIF) — ”whose chief executive met with a member of President Donald Trump's transition team four days before Trump's inauguration."
That transition team official is Anthony Scaramucci, a Wall Streeter who was expected to take a prominent White House position but did not. Scaramucci met in January with RDIF head Kirill Dmitriev.
The CNN exclusive — which hung from one unnamed source — didn't take long to wither. Breitbart News's Matthew Boyle bombed the CNN piece as baseless. Sputnik News published a refutation, indicating that the fund was not a part of Russian state bank Vnesheconombank, as the CNN report had claimed. This detail mattered a great deal, considering that Vnesheconombank was listed in a set of sanctions issued by the U.S. government. According to the CNN report, the Senate Intelligence Committee's probe into this matter was linked to the meeting between top Trump adviser/son-in-law Jared Kushner and Vnesheconombank CEO Sergey Gorkov during the presidential transition.
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CNN issued a retraction late on Friday
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Now for the consequences. CNN announced on Monday afternoon that three network officials are leaving their jobs over the incident: Frank, the reporter on the story; Eric Lichtblau, a recent CNN addition from the New York Times who edited the piece; and Lex Haris, the executive editor of ”CNN Investigates." The moves follow an investigation carried out by CNN executives over the weekend, with the conclusion that longstanding network procedures for publishing stories weren't properly followed. ”There was a significant breakdown in process," says a CNN source. ”There were editorial checks and balances within the organization that weren't met."
The official CNN statement: ”In the aftermath of the retraction of a story published on CNN.com, CNN has accepted the resignations of the employees involved in the story's publication."
Regarding the personnel changes, a CNN source said, ”The individuals all stated that they accepted responsibility and wanted to resign." A compelling wrinkle in the saga of the story springs from the careful language in the editor's note: ”That story did not meet CNN's editorial standards and has been retracted. Links to the story have been disabled. CNN apologizes to Mr. Scaramucci," it reads. CNN is not bailing on all the factual representations in the story, however. ”We pulled it down not because we disproved it," says a CNN source, adding that there was ”enough concern" on some factual points that ”given the breach in process, we decided to pull it down."
