did malia zimmerman. they knew i never said these things and i challenged them immediately. reporter: fox retracted the bogus story a week after it was published. fox news told cnn in a statement today that the accusations that fox helped to detract from coverage of russia collusion is completely erroneous and that it has no evidence that rod wheeler was misquoted. ed butowsky told cnn it was all just a joke. and today white house press secretary sarah huckabee sanders pushed back on allegations the white house played a role in this scheme. the president had no knowledge of this story and it s completely untrue that he or the white house involvement in the story. reporter: randi kaye, cnn, new york. randi got this statement from the attorney for rod wheeler who told her he wanted to depose the president. the attorney says, we re going do litigate this case as we would any other. we want to talk to anyone who has information, that means the
words? i mean a reporter has to sign up. they have to call the person and say these are your quotes, i m running with this. absolutely. as a matter of fact, i pushed back right away. i received a telephone call from cnn the morning that this story went out on foxnews.com. but before it did, did she call you and say here are your quotes? no, she never did. about two or three days before the story was published, she sent me a version of the story that did not contain any of the quotes. i was good with that. it was the story that was actually published that the quotes were added to and then that s what i immediately, by the way, let me underline that word, immediately pushed back on her. even before this story went viral, i said, wait a minute, malia, what s the stuff about me and these quotes. she said, oh, we ll remove it, rod, sorry about that. she never removed it. when i confronted butowsky about it, he said the quotes were left in there because that s the way president wanted
the story. nbc news reached out to mr. spicer for comment and he told us, quote, ed is a longtime supporter of the president s agenda who often appears in the media. he asked for a ten-minute meeting with no specified topic to catch up and said he would be bringing along a contributor to fox news. as ed himself has noted, he has never met the president and the white house has nothing to do with the story. we re going to dig into this. it is extraordinary. joining us now, the man who filed the lawsuit, rod wheeler, and his attorney. rod, let s start with you. you claimed that the fox reporter, malia zimmerman, made up two quotes in this article atri attributing them to you. what do you say ifalse? well, the quotes that she added to her story specifically references me as saying that i knew for a fact that the decedent in this case, seth rich, sent e-mails to wikileaks. and that just was totally fabricated.
on the an e-mails. i know that, you know that. if you set eyes on the e-mails, you would have told me. you never told me. if malia zimmerman who is a wonderful reporter, if she misquoted you, then you know what? then that needs to be taken back. i said rod, show me where that quote exists. by the way, chris, i ll ask anybody, show me where the quote exists where it says rod wheeler set eyes on the e-mails. i ve never seen that s what i was responding to. so when you were saying you re going to win an award for those things that you didn t say, what did you we were laughing because basically i said how crazy this world is because rod, you re telling me that you said that you that malia zimmerman wrote that you said exactly what i just said a second ago that you set eyes on it. id said, rod you know that didn t happen. we were laughing about what a crazy word this is because somehow you know, you re going
they have to see this stories all over the place and fox perpetuated it. and they begged for weeks asking the network to stop it. for whatever reason it took a considerable am of time. you mentioned wikileaks, according to the news the fox here are those stamtsz. my investigation up to this point shows there was some degree of e-mail exchange between seth rich and wikileakses. my investigation shows someone within the dc government, democratic or national commitment of team is blocking the murder investigation from going forward. that is unfortunate. seth richard s murder is unsolved as a result of that. now, this is what wheeler said was his first reaction when he saw those bogus lies attributed to him. the reporter from fox news, malia zimmerman wrote that story. i immediately challenged her and said this is simply not true,