CNN released a statement Wednesday night defending host Kaitlan Collins after she hosted a town hall for former President Donald Trump in New Hampshire — his first interview on the network since 2016.
“Tonight Kaitlan Collins exemplified what it means to be a world-class journalist,” the network said.
“She asked tough, fair and revealing questions. And she followed up and fact-checked President Trump in real time to arm voters with crucial information about his positions as he enters the 2024 election as the Republican frontrunner. That is CNN’s role and responsibility: to get answers and hold the powerful to account.”
Collins appeared to have a decent start while pressing the president about some of his claims surrounding the 2020 presidential election and the January 6, 2021, riot, but she quickly lost control of the event.
Collins’ much-criticized performance came as news broke that CNN CEO Chris Licht was reportedly set to announce that the 31-year-old would be offered a new contract to serve as host of the network’s 9 p.m. primetime hour, which was previously occupied for years by former CNN host Chris Cuomo.
The report from Puck News said that Collins’ performance tonight is not expected to impact the offer that CNN is about to make her, but cautioned that with Trump, anything is possible.
Puck News reported that the announcement is expected to take place in the coming days and would cap off Collins’ fast rise through the network from her time as a White House reporter who often got under the skin of former President Donald Trump to become a fresh face for the network’s primetime lineup.
Imagine Biden in an interview like this on Newsmax ??? No, Biden is incapable.
I just wish Trump had memorized an answer to respond to the nasty moderator who kept interrupting him as it pertained to the rigged 2020 election.
He could have referenced the swing states simultaneously shutting down the counting with Trump well ahead, the fake water leak in one of those states, the video of poll workers pulling suitcases from underneath tables containing ballots and stuffing the same pile of ballots multiple times into the machines, the trucks pulling up in the middle of the night to unload ballots, the video in Philadelphia of poll workers boarding up the windows so poll watchers could not see what was going on, the video of the drop boxes that we see in Dinesh D’Souza’s movie, the number of dead people who voted, the number of votes cast by people with fake addresses, the number of votes cast by people in multiple states, the thousands of people who signed sworn affidavits testifying to the voter fraud that they witnessed, and the fact that there is no way in hell that Biden got 50 million legitimate votes, never mind 81 million.
When that moderator asked Trump if he would promise, in advance, to accept the results in 2024, I would have said, the only way I could make that promise before an election, which could produce the same kind of voter fraud we had in 2020 and 2022, is to secure the election process beforehand as we once did in this country with voter ID requirements in all 50 states, voting only in person for all but the infirmed and military, paper ballots that can be checked against the count after the election, and a single day to vote (on election DAY, not election month). The only reason why Democrats fight these common sense policies is because they cannot win elections without cheating.