By Cliff Kincaid

January 9, 2025

I have a soft spot in my heart for CNN. When Pat Buchanan was in the Reagan White House serving as communications director, I filled in for him numerous times on the CNN “Crossfire” show, presenting the conservative opinion in response to the liberal opinion offered by figures like Tom Braden or Michael Kinsley. That balanced program went down the drain and CNN became an organ of the Democratic Party.

When I did “Crossfire,” the liberals were the ones with the complaints. They didn’t like the fact that Tom Braden was the regular liberal co-host, usually up against Pat Buchanan and then myself. Braden was an anti-communist liberal who in fact had been a CIA operative. Mchael Kinsley, editor of the New Republic, replaced Braden.

Today, the only identifiable conservative commentator on the channel is Scott Jennings, always outnumbered by the hosts and liberal panelists. For being effective in this role, he has been attacked by the Washington Post and the Huffington Post.

However, I am happy to report that, on rare occasions, CNN can stumble on the truth, and this kind of reporting should be encouraged if CNN wants to survive and return to its roots.

Consider a CNN article that is significant for what its reporters Evan Perez and Hannah Rabinowitz did NOT discover about the federal government’s effort to put President Trump in prison.

It focused on the “lost year,” in the context of the feds wasting time trying to link President Trump to the January 6 “insurrection,” and helps explain why America is so vulnerable to terrorist attack. The Department of Justice and the FBI spent months trying to link Trump and his “inner circle” to the event and failed. They relied on a fake “informant” and dozens if not hundreds of FBI agents were used in a wild goose chase.

These federal resources should have been used to pursue the real enemies of America.

Considering the anti-Trump bias of CNN, the story nevertheless proves that Trump had clean hands and was not connected in any way to any violence.

There was never an insurrection, only a protest, and we still don’t know the full extent of the FBI use of informants in the crowd and what role they played in the physical confrontations.

Here’s how CNN reported it:

“Prosecutors inside the Justice Department also dug through reams of opaque financial records, searching for any direct links between Trump and the organizations that brought ‘Stop the Steal’ rallygoers to Washington for his speech ahead of the Capitol attack. From there, they examined the so-called war room setup at the Willard hotel in Washington, where Steve Bannon and other Trump supporters strategized how to thwart the certification of Joe Biden’s electoral victory.”

“Several months after the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol,” CNN reported, “FBI investigators began pursuing a tantalizing tip suggesting that Donald Trump had possibly met with members of the Proud Boys, the far-right group that took part in some of the most brutal violence that day, people briefed on the investigation told CNN.”

The “most brutal violence” was the murder of Trump supporter Ashli Babbitt by a U.S. Capitol Police officer.

That fact aside, CNN said that investigators spent months “poring over call records of Proud Boys members and conducting scores of interviews” and developed an “informant” who had “alleged an interaction between Trump or his inner circle and the Proud Boys…”

“In the end,” CNN reported, “no direct criminal links to Trump emerged” and investigations of various people and meetings “were all dead ends.”

In the end, CNN discovered that protests, even against elections, were protected under the First Amendment. But CNN did not conclude that Trump was vindicated.

Trump had said at the rally: “We have come to demand that Congress do the right thing and only count the electors who have been lawfully slated. I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.”

Very few stormed the Capitol. These protesters were outraged over a national election being stolen, in the wake of news reports released at that time by the media that Vice President Mike Pence had announced that he would NOT stop the steal.

Trump had every right to protest and Pence had the duty to send the results back to the states. Pence failed.

This dispute is what led to Biden taking office and his handlers ordering the Department of Justice and the FBI to tie Trump to the violence. They failed, too.

Trump won but he still has a big job ahead, not only to pardon the January 6 peaceful protesters but identify those still in the Justice Department and the FBI who wasted federal resources in what was clearly a “weaponization” of the justice system.

Whether CNN survives or not in this new media environment will depend on whether it follows Mark Zuckerberg’s lead and stops censoring Trump and his supporters. Only truthful and balanced journalism will help restore the channel to the approach it once had in programs like “Crossfire.”

After finally setting the record straight about Trump’s non-existent link to violence on January 6, we will now wait to see if CNN reporters Evan Perez and Hannah Rabinowitz seek to hold federal officials accountable for conducting “investigations” that diverted resources away from finding real terrorists on American soil.

If it fails to hold these officials accountable, we will know that CNN hasn’t learned any lessons.

© 2024 Cliff Kincaid – All Rights Reserved

E-Mail Cliff Kincaid: [email protected]

• Cliff Kincaid is president of America’s Survival, Inc. usasurvival.org

[H/T News With Views]