CNN has accused the family of Colton Haab, a student at the Florida high school where a gunman killed 17 people last week, of doctoring an email between Haab's father, Glenn Haab, and CNN in order to defend Colton's claims that CNN rewrote a question for Colton to ask at the network's Wednesday town-hall-style event on school shootings.
Colton told the Fox News host Tucker Carlson on Thursday night that CNN executive producer Carrie Stevenson gave him a question to deliver to lawmakers and told him to "stick to the script."
But CNN says there is "absolutely no truth" to Colton's claims, which he first made on a Miami TV-news station .
"In my interview with CNN, I had talked about arming the teachers, if they were willing to arm themselves in the school, to carry on campus," Colton told Carlson. "And they had - she had taken that, of what I had briefed on, and actually wrote that question out for me."
CNN says that Stevenson and Colton agreed on one question that Colton would ask, but that Glenn intervened, sending a lengthy speech (see below) that he wanted Colton to read, which included three questions for lawmakers.
Stevenson responded that the speech was "way too long" and that Colton "needs to stick" to the question they agreed on. Glenn then responded that he and his son "are not actors" and that Colton would not participate in the town hall if he could not read the full speech.
On Friday afternoon, Fox News and the HuffPost reached out to CNN to verify emails between the Haabs and Stevenson that they received from Colton.
A CNN source provided Colton's version of the emails, as well as their versions of all of the communications between the Haabs and CNN, to Business Insider.
In CNN's version of one email, Stevenson told Glenn that Colton needed to stick to a question that he and Stevenson "discussed on the phone that he submitted." But in the version of the email provided by Colton to Fox and HuffPost, the phrase, "that he submitted" is deleted.
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