CNN employees have resigned for their role in pushing fake news about the Trump-Russia story that claimed a member of the Trump transition team was under investigation.
Reporter Thomas Frank, editor Eric Lichtblau and executive editor Lex Haris all resigned from their positions following a company-wide investigation into the single-sourced story that was quickly debunked, The Washington Post first reported. CNN quickly followed up with a story of their own on the resignations. Lichtblau reportedly oversaw the false story, while Haris headed up CNN’s investigative unit.
“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,” CNN’s coverage quotes a company spokesman as saying.
The retracted story, which relied upon a single unnamed congressional source, claimed that Senate investigators were probing Trump adviser Anthony Scaramucci and whether or not he discussed lifting sanctions during a meeting with a Russia banker just days before Trump’s inauguration. CNN later retracted the story and apologized to Scaramucci