As CNN relegated Jim Acosta, ultimately leading to his resignation, a former CNN analyst and longtime critic of Donald Trump has issued a mea culpa on President Trump's nailing the COVID lab leak from Day 1 and having defended disgraced Dr. Anthony Fauci.
"I screwed up," Chris Cillizza wrote Monday night in a 15-tweet thread. "Back in May 2020, I wrote how Anthony Fauci had 'crushed' Donald Trump's lab-leak theory for how Covid-19 originated."
"The CIA said over the weekend that they now believed the virus leaked from a lab."
Ultimately, the thread was a backhanded compliment, because Cillizza still managed to smear Trump even as he admitted he was the one wrong all along.
But there are nuggets of truth and admissions in his thread.
"It now appears that the reality TV-star-turned-president was right," Cillizza wrote in post 5 of 15. "And Anthony Fauci was wrong."
"It never entered my mind that, as president, it was possible that Trump has been privy to information not publicly available on the virus," he added in post 12 of 15.
Conservatives have long made that statement to Trump critics, and Cillizza is now catching on.
"The lesson: Be skeptical — of experts or anyone else — when dealing with a rapidly-developing and changing situation where no one has the ability to see a 360-degree view," Cillizza added in post 14 of 15, a rich point that conservatives long attempted to tell anti-Trump forces during COVID's earliest days — to fully deaf ears.
Despite the admission of faulty, if not biased, anti-Trump analysis, Cillizza is not backing down on criticizing Trump but doubling down on it as he defended the disgraced Acosta.
"Jim Acosta being forced out of CNN is the latest sign that legacy media is working to accommodate Donald Trump in ways considered unimaginable during his first term," Cillizza wrote.
Eric Mack ✉
Eric Mack has been a writer and editor at Newsmax since 2016. He is a 1998 Syracuse University journalism graduate and a New York Press Association award-winning writer.
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