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The Slatest Your News Companion June 27 2017 1:58 PM The Noninsane Person’s Guide to the CNN Scandal the President Spent His Morning Yelling About 574 30 258 By Ben Mathis-Lilley

Trump Zucker Donald Trump (then starring on The Apprentice) and CNN president Jeff Zucker (then the president of NBC Entertainment) on Oct. 15, 2004, in New York City.

Evan Agostini/Getty Images

Last week, CNN's investigative unit published a piece that asserted that the Senate Intelligence Committee and the Treasury Department were looking into potentially inappropriate activity related to a meeting between Wall Street bigshot/Trump 2016 fundraiser Anthony Scaramucci and an executive at the Russian Direct Investment Fund. Late Friday night, CNN retracted and deleted the story. On Monday, three CNN employees involved with the piece—the reporter who wrote it, the executive editor for investigations, and an assistant managing editor for investigations—resigned. Since then, President Donald Trump and his son Donald Trump Jr. have been tweeting nearly nonstop about CNN. For example: screen_shot_20170627_at_11.57.54_am

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And: screen_shot_20170627_at_11.58.50_am

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And: screen_shot_20170627_at_1.34.57_pm

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Are the Donalds Trump right? Did CNN finally get caught doing FAKE NEWS for real? Should we be mad at CNN for screwing up and giving Trump the opportunity to bash the media for cause? Let's take a deep breath and figure out what is happening.

What was wrong with the CNN story? Advertisement

CNN says the piece "did not meet CNN's editorial standards." Politico reports that the piece's publication violated internal rules requiring that stories involving anonymous sources be shown to an executive editor before publication. Politico also says the network's legal team "had not fully reviewed the final piece." (It's common practice in journalism to have lawyers vet stories that involve accusations of criminal or otherwise inappropriate behavior.) BuzzFeed notes that the CNN piece cited only a "single, unnamed source" and says the network is instituting further pre-publication guidelines regarding the handling of stories involving Trump and Russia.

But what was actually wrong with the story?

CNN hasn't said, but we can gather some clues from a copy of the story that's been accidentally preserved on the website of a local TV station in New York. The piece revolves around a Jan. 16 meeting between Scaramucci and Russia Direct Investment Fund chief executive Kirill Dmitriev. CNN spoke to Scaramucci for its piece, and he described the "meeting" to the network as a brief, incidental interaction at a restaurant in Switzerland during a conference. The since-retracted piece says that Scaramucci discussed this interaction on Bloomberg TV the day after it happened, which is true. Scaramucci told Bloomberg that he spoke to Dmitriev about the possibility of facilitating relationships between the Russian fund and American executives. He also noted to Bloomberg that he would have to conduct any such activity within appropriate ethical guidelines. (At the time, Scaramucci was expected to take an official job in the Trump administration, but that didn't end up happening.)