Speaking to Sciutto and co-host Poppy Harlow, Washington Examiner correspondent Salena Zito -- who has been accused of making up quotes from Trump supporters to flesh out her stories -- was asked about the president's controversial comments and tweets.
"I just want to highlight this for a moment, because Savannah Guthrie pressed the president on what is a central conspiracy theory of QAnon, and that's that Democrats run -- and I am saying it out loud because it became the topic yesterday -- it was a Democratic satanic cult involved in child trafficking, which there is no evidence," Sciutto began. "Why isn't that a simple answer for the president? As you noted, the real job for the president is to win over skeptical undecided voters."
"Right. I think the president is answering the question in the way that he believes voters are viewing this type of question," Zito answered. "I don't know if that's right or wrong, I just think that that is his instinct. So what he says is, you know, I don't know everything about them, alright? And I don't know this part about them but I do know this tiny bit about them, and in talking to voters who are undecided and who are watching that, they tend to be more interested, fair or unfair, about things that impact their lives rather than things that tend to live in their point of view on the internet and not really in their lives."
"Salena, but with respect," the CNN host interjected. "This is a conspiracy theory that Democrats are running a child sex ring out of the basement of a pizza place in Washington where my son had his seventh birthday, right? It's patently false and I don't have a better word for it than wackadoodle."
"Let's be frank," he continued. "Shouldn't it be easy for the president of the United States to dismiss a baseless conspiracy theory in this important moment?"
"Of course," the journalist replied looking startled by the pushback.
"It should be very easy," she said as she backtracked. "He's not always done things in the way that we, as journalists, have an expectation for him to do, and we as journalists want to see a straight answer, even about something that people are unsure what it means, let alone to how to even say it, and yeah, it should be easy to say."
"I don't support that and I condemn it. It's crisp in clear terms in the way he denounced white supremacy last night, and he should have been able to do that with that as well," she added.
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