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CNN Mixes Up Trump White House Official With Obama Admin Member in On-Air Graphic

Twitter / Screenshot
December 9, 2017

CNN posted the wrong photo of Trump White House official Raj Shah on Friday night, mistaking him for an Obama administration member with a similar name.

"Anderson Cooper 360" used the wrong photo of Shah, the White House principal deputy secretary, alongside a graphic with his quote about Trump's endorsement of Alabama Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore. According to the Washington Examiner, the picture CNN used was of Rajiv Shah, former administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development.

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders slammed CNN for the mistake, tweeting, "this is definitely not @RajShah45 but it is #FakeNews."

Anderson Cooper addressed the mistake on his show Friday night and apologized for the show using the wrong photo.

The error followed up a far larger one made by the news organization earlier that day, when CNN erroneously reported Donald Trump Jr. received an email offering a decryption key and website address for hacked WikiLeaks documents:

CNN added that the email "indicated that the Trump campaign could access records from former Secretary of State Colin Powell, whose hacked emails were made public by a Russian front group 10 days later."

But the Washington Post reported hours later that CNN got the date of the email wrong, noting it was actually sent on Sept. 14, after Powell's leaked emails were already released.

"The full email—which was first described to CNN as being sent on Sept. 4, 10 days earlier—indicates that the writer may have simply been flagging information that was already widely available," the Postwrote.

An attorney for Donald Trump Jr. told the Post that the email was just one of "a ton of unsolicited emails like this on a variety of topics."

Wall Street Journal reporter Rebecca Ballhaus soon chimed in, adding that the email came from a small-time Trump donor and was "riddled with typos."