CNN thought it had a major scoop indicating Donald Trump and his inner circle coordinated with Russian-aligned operatives in 2016 to tilt the presidential election.

CNN was wrong.

“Exclusive: Email shows effort to give Trump campaign WikiLeaks documents,” read the titillating headline.

The story claimed the 2016 GOP nominee, his son Donald Trump Jr., and various campaign advisers received an email in September 2016 offering them advance access to an impending WikiLeaks dump of emails stolen from Democratic National Committee staffers and Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta.

The CNN report hinged entirely on an email that was supposedly sent on Sept. 4. The September email to Trump and his team included a “decryption key and website address” for the WikiLeaks dump, the article added.

There’s a major, glaring error in this story, which CNN promoted all Friday morning and into the afternoon.

The email upon which the entire story hinges was sent on Sept. 14, not Sept. 4, meaning the email merely pointed Trump's team to a trove of already-public hacked DNC documents.

Note the date of this WikiLeaks tweet:

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/cnn-with-a-colossal-fkup-on-trump...