In the wake of the decision ABC News made to settle with President-elect Donald Trump in his lawsuit against the network and anchor George Stephanopoulos over a claim that he made about the president-elect’s legal liability in a contentious interview earlier in the year, CNN’s Jake Tapper freaked out live on air, ranting about the network’s decision being a bad one.
The issue at the root of Trump’s suit and ABC’s settlement involved a conversation Stephanopoulos had with Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC), in which he claimed, falsely, that the president-elect was found “liable for rape” in a civil case brought by E. Jean Carroll. He said, “You’ve endorsed Donald Trump for president. Judges and two separate juries have found him liable for rape and for defaming the victim of that rape.” In fact, Stephanopoulos made that “liable for rape” claim ten times during his contentious interview with Mace, which was very false; a jury actually determined Trump was liable for “sexual abuse,” a different legal status.
ABC, faced with the suit, settled with the president-elect. Under the terms of the settlement agreement, ABC will pay $15 million to a charity of Trump’s choice, $1 million in legal fees for him, and attach to an article about the comments a note reading, “ABC News and George Stephanopoulos regret statements regarding President Donald J. Trump made during an interview by George Stephanopoulos with Rep. Nancy Mace on ABC’s This Week on March 10, 2024.”
Freaking out on Monday, December 16, Jake Tapper first commented on the millions of dollars involved in the settlement. He said, on that note, “Because this weekend ABC News agreed to pay $16 million including legal fees to settle a defamation lawsuit brought by Trump against the network and their anchor George Stephanopoulos.”
Continuing, Tapper got to what appeared to be worrying him most about the settlement, noting that it appeared to be just one step in his campaign to punish the media. Making that point about the settlement, he said, “And that obviously will not be the end of this campaign against the media legal campaign against the media.”
Continuing, Tapper rolled footage of Trump sounding off the media and noting his other lawsuits, such as the one brought against an Iowa paper over what he characterized as election interference. He said, “I’m going to be bringing one against the people in Iowa, their newspaper. We’re filing one on ’60 Minutes.’ We’re involved in one, which has been going on for a while and very successfully against Bob Woodward.”
Building on that, Trump commented on another suit his team has launched against the media, saying, “We have one very interestingly on Pulitzer because reporters at The New York Times, Washington Post got Pulitzer Prizes for their wonderful, accurate and highly professional reporting on the Russia Russia, Russia hoax.”
Commenting on that campaign against the media, Tapper freaked out about the suit against the Des Moines Register, saying, “We don’t have time to go into all of that, but just to touch base on a couple, one of them is the people of Iowa, The Des Moines Register. That’s because there was a poll that was that was inaccurate. The one on ’60 Minutes’ is because they didn’t like the editing that had been done to Kamala Harris.” A minute later, he added, “Yeah. I mean, this is — this is wildly ridiculous.”
Watch him here:
Featured image credit: Featured image credit: nrkbeta, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Jake_Tapper_(CNN)_@_SXSW_2017_(33419983525).jpg
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