Politics

Tucker Takes BuzzFeed’s Ben Smith To School On Dossier, ‘Partisanship Played A Role’ [VIDEO]

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Nick Givas Media And Politics Reporter
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BuzzFeed’s Editor-in-Chief Ben Smith appeared on Fox News’ “Tucker Carlson Tonight” Wednesday, to respond to a lawsuit filed by President Donald Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen, over Smith’s publishing of an infamous dossier.

“The dossier itself is a document of kind of obvious central public importance,” Smith said Wednesday. “That was clear a year ago. It’s actually a lot clearer now. Before we published it, as we knew then, important elected officials intelligence agencies were investigating this document.”

Carlson said Smith should have known better than to publish a document without fully verifying its contents.

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“You see a lot of stuff that you don’t pass on, because you don’t know if it’s true. And the words hang in the air and you libel someone in effect, so you don’t run it,” Carlson said. “But you did run this, because it was Trump.”

Smith stood by his decision to publish the dossier and believes recent media coverage vindicated his decision.

“But you’re making a retroactive argument,” Carlson responded. “You’re arguing well okay it’s at the center of news, so we were right a year ago to run it. And I’m actually not even attacking you for running it, I would just like you to acknowledge partisanship played a role.”

Carlson said if Smith had come across something damaging to former President Barack Obama he would have withheld it for political reasons and never made it public.

“If you came across a dossier in the middle of the Obama administration that laid out in some detail how he was born in Kenya and had a weird personal life, you would never run that. Because you would be attacked by every one of your friends,” Tucker laughed.

“The truth is this stuff was unverified a year ago, it remains unverified,” Carlson added. “We are no closer to proving that [Trump] collaborated with the Russian government.”

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