(CNSNews.com) — Corey Lewandowski, former campaign manager for presidential candidate Donald Trump, said that when he was on CNN the night of the 2016 presidential election, the “very smug” network refused to call the election when they knew at 10:00 p.m. that Trump would win.
At the Turning Point USA High School Leadership Summit on Thursday, Lewandowski recalled his experience with CNN on election night, saying, “I’m a dummy, went to a state school, but I know how to add. And I know how to count to 270, right? “
“And I’m looking at the numbers, I’m calling my friends around the country on election night, and they’re like, ‘yeah, we’re winning in Florida, we’re winning in South Carolina, we’re winning in North Carolina,’ and I’m like, we got 270,” he said. “We’re over 270—by the way, we win in Maine, second district, right?”
Lewandowski continued, “And so I tell the president of CNN News, Jeff Zucker, I said, ‘Jeff, call the race. It’s over. Donald Trump is the president-elect of the United States.’ That’s at about 10 o’clock at night.”
“They wait till 3:00 a.m.,” said Lewandowski. “They know Donald Trump is going to be the president. Nobody calls the race.”
“And, I remember sitting there on the stage—on the day I sat—CNN, sitting next to a guy by the name of Van Jones, and David Axelrod, and all these guys—and at five o’clock in the afternoon, they were very smug, right?” he said.
“‘Oh, Hillary Clinton’s got the greatest turnout operation ever, she knows if you ate Wheaties for breakfast at 8:05, and she knows who’s going to vote,’” said Lewandowski, “and they were all just telling us how great Hillary was going to do—it was going to be the biggest blowout in election, modern election history.”
“By 11 o’clock, they weren’t so happy—11 o’clock that night,” he said. “By 1:00 a.m., they were really mad. And I remember Jeff Zucker walked in—I’m kind of a smug guy ‘cause I grew up poor, and don’t care—and I said—Jeff Zucker, president of CNN said, ‘You know, guys, you got to have some energy up here, you know. And Corey, you need to be magnanimous.’”
“I said, ‘No f—ing way.’ I’m not magnanimous,” related Lewandowski. “I said, ‘I am going to remind everybody, including everybody who sat here, who told us we were going to lose the biggest race in modern election history.’”
