Politics

Jake Tapper Calls Questions Leaked To Hillary At CNN ‘Horrific’ And ‘Unethical’

CNN’s Jake Tapper absolutely condemned the Wikileaks revelation that Donna Brazile had received a question in advance of a townhall where he partnered with Roland S. Martin, and gave it to the Hillary campaign.

Listen below to his very harsh, but reasonable, condemnation of what happened:

Politico explains it in detail:

A new email obtained by POLITICO is shedding more light on the mystery of whether and how interim DNC chair Donna Brazile might have obtained the text of a proposed question from a town hall between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders in advance, and possibly shared it with the Clinton campaign.

And now CNN, which co-hosted the town hall with cable network TV One, is pointing the finger at its media partner for what appears to be a breach of the traditional secrecy surrounding the questions for such events.

The email obtained by POLITICO was written by town hall co-moderator Roland Martin on the day of the town hall to CNN producers. But it shows him using word for word the language of a question that Brazile appeared to have sent to the Clinton campaign a day earlier. That email, from Brazile to the campaign, was included in yesterday’s release of hacked emails by Wikileaks of Clinton campaign chair John Podesta.

I take Tapper at his word as he’s one of the most fair and reputable journalists working right now, BUT what is being done about this? Roland Martin should be run out of journalism and never have another job in this industry ever again. Imagine if this had happened at Fox News.

And look what it does to our politics – it makes Trump’s exaggerated absurdist conspiracy theory claims of a “rigged election” look more and more feasible. There isn’t a condemnation strong enough for what happened here and not only do heads need to roll, but standards need to change to ensure this doesn’t happen again.

But it won’t. And that’s why the media is partly to blame for the rise of a dim-wit demagogue like Trump.