PANAMA CITY, Fla. (CN) — CNN employees defended their reporting and fact-checking process on Wednesday as a high-profile defamation case against the network entered its final days of trial.
Several people at the network described their role in approving the story at the center of the case, which aired on Nov. 11, 2021, and described the adversity faced by Afghans trying to flee their country during the United States’ hasty withdrawal from Afghanistan. The piece included interviews with some people who claimed private contractors were charging tens of thousands for “black market” evacuations.
Zachary Young, a U.S. Navy veteran and self-employed security consultant, was the only private contractor named in the story, prompting his lawsuit accusing the network of ruining his reputation and business, Nemex Enterprises.
Young says he never accepted money from individual Afghans and instead relied on sponsorships from corporations like Audible and Bloomberg to help rescue those fleeing the war-torn country. Judge William Henry of the 14th Judicial Circuit of Florida previously ruled that there is no proof Young committed any illegal acts.
Young’s involvement in the story began when he messaged CNN senior reporter Katie Bo Lillis on career networking site LinkedIn.
“Hi Katie, nice to connect,” Young wrote to the reporter. “Please let me know if I can assist with any Afghan evac requirements. I get requests from journalists stuck in country on a daily basis. Is CNN involved in rescue efforts, or would they like to be?”
Lillis asked for his number.
“I’m kind of old school,” she told the jurors on Wednesday. “I think you can have a more nuanced, fulsome conversation and, in my line of work, getting the whole story is the most important thing, and I find the best way to do that is actually speaking to somebody.”
But Young continued to message Lillis on the app Signal, under the impression CNN needed help evacuating people from Afghanistan, until Lillis told him she was working on a story, according to screenshots of their conversation shown in court.
Lillis began asking questions about Young’s prices for evacuation, any examples of a successful evacuation and if he made a profit.
“This was a personal life or death situation, and nobody I knew was trying to make money off of it,” Lillis testified. “If that was going on here, then that was newsworthy.”
“Our understanding from other sources that we had that were doing these kinds of evacuations was that these prices were way, way higher than what it actually costs to get somebody out of Afghanistan,” Lillis continued. “It was incredibly dangerous, it was incredibly complicated … but by all accounts it was not this expensive.”
In the Signal messages, Young declined to talk about sponsors, citing their wishes to for him to sign a non-disclosure agreement, and side-stepped the profit question. After another related question by Lillis, Young said he could not break down his prices, because he “was not on the ground” and did not “understand the challenges.”
“I thought it was kind of nuts,” Lillis said. “What businessowner doesn’t know what his overhead is?”
Young then warned Lillis to “have your facts aligned before taking a few text messages and running with it.”
Lillis told the court the exchange me her “think we were on the right track.”
“Because the people who were doing evacuations that we spoke to frequently — the nonprofits, the former service members — those guys couldn’t wait to talk to you about what they were doing,” she said. “They very much wanted to talk about the mission, they wanted to talk about their success cases, not just because it was something they were passionate about … but that was how they fundraised to get more people out of the country.”
Lillis took screenshots of the LinkedIn and Signal messages and sent them to Alexander Marquardt, who ultimately reported the story that appeared during “The Lead with Jake Tapper.” In the ensuing text messages, Marquardt told Lillis that Young has “shut down” Afghans who don’t have sponsors.
“What a shitbag,” Lillis responded.
In court, Lillis defended her words.
“Because these were human beings,” she said, looking at the jurors, her voice rising. “These were desperate people who were terrified the Taliban was going to kill them, kill their family. … I understand if you can’t help. But to just shut somebody down that is that desperate and that frightened and just ghosting the engagement, I thought that was callous.”
The depositions and testimony of CNN employees provided a rare look into the network’s story vetting process called “the triad” that involves members of the network’s fact-checking, legal and standards and practices divisions.
All major stories must go through the triad before publishing, Adam Levine, senior vice president of news, told the court Wednesday. After reviewing Marquardt’s pitch, Levine immediately engaged the triad, which had to approve his pitch, his questions to Young and the final version of the script.
That process included Emma Lacey-Bordeaux, senior director of standards and practices, who also took the stand Wednesday. Her job, she said, is looking at issues from an ethics standpoint.
“Factually true, legally sound, but gray,” she said.
Lacey-Bordeaux used the recent New Orleans terrorist attack, in which several videos surfaced of the carnage on Bourbon Street, as an example.
“In an event like that it’s important for the public to understand what happened,” she said. “So for instance, S&P would be involved in looking at those videos and making a determination of how much of them should we show, should be give a warning. Making sure we’re balancing the horror of that moment and the public’s right to know what happened,” she said.
Lacey-Bordeaux approved Marquardt’s script two hours before his story aired, she testified.
“I felt like I had plenty of time to review it,” she said.
Though Lacey-Bordeaux did not approve the banner that appeared with the story containing the term “black market,” she still stood by its use.
“It means that it is an unregulated market,” she said.
At one point during cross-examination, Young’s attorney asked Lacey-Bordeaux if CNN treated news as theater.
“I don’t think I’ve ever heard of that,” she said. “I don’t think CNN treats news as theater … We don’t create the news.”
During his testimony, Levine said all the testimony given in the trial shows how much vetting goes into publishing a short segment on CNN.
“You’ve heard all the people that have come up here and said all the work that went into this, even before the proposal went out, to all the reporting that happened, to all the vetting that happened, all the questions that happened, the continued outreach,” Levine said. “All for a story that showed up an hour 40 minutes into ‘The Lead.’ This wasn’t even the top story.”
“It’s a real reflection of what CNN does across the board,” he added. “It shows the care that we take to show the reporting is accurate and right.”
Earlier in the morning, before jurors were seated, presiding judge Henry addressed a motion by Young’s attorneys to allow a new witness to testify, even though they had rested their case the day prior.
That witness, Ian Conway, is CEO of Helios Global, a government contractor that signed a consulting agreement with Young in December 2021 — just weeks after the CNN story aired. Last week, CNN attorney David Axelrod surprised the court with a copy of the agreement and implied Young had been lying throughout the case about not being able to find work. As part of arguments made throughout the trial, CNN has continued to assert that Young never lost his security clearance, and thus, should be able to find work as a government contractor.
However, last night, Young’s attorneys discovered correspondence between CNN and Helios Global that confirmed Young lost his security clearance in 2022. By putting Conway on the stand, Young’s attorneys hope to bolster the security consultant’s contention that the CNN story ruined his career.
After a brief recess, Henry approved the witness, but chided the attorneys.
“This isn’t kindergarten,” Henry said. “Y’all matriculated from kindergarten a long, long time ago, or at least that’s what it says because you have bar licenses.”
“I’m overly concerned with the level of professionalism, or the lack thereof ,” he continued.
Henry saved much of his ire for Axelrod.
“I think an apology from you to Mr. Young is in order for the number of times in front of this court, and streamed around the world, that you called Mr. Young a liar for failing to disclose a document that you had no proof was in his possession, custody or control,” Henry said.
Just before letting the jurors enter the courtroom, the judge made one last warning.
“Let me say this: y’all may lawyer like that in Philly, New York, D.C., or Miami, but you don’t lawyer like this around here,” he said. “We’re not going to play shenanigans anymore in this case.”
The trial is set to conclude this week.