Former CNN Reporter Michelle Kosinski Denies Affair with British Ambassador to US Investigated for Intel Leaks
Former CNN reporter Michelle Kosinski is denying that she ever engaged in an affair with former British Ambassador to the United States Kim Darroch.
“Now, this nonsense,” Kosinski wrote in a message on Twitter over the weekend. “British tabloids printing incorrect information about my private life is unacceptable. This has been referred to my lawyers.”
The denial comes after a Friday report by the British newspaper, The Sun, that Kosinski, 44, engaged in an affair with Darroch, 66, while she was working as CNN’s senior diplomatic correspondent, and that the Department of Justice investigated Darroch for allegedly leaking sensitive information to Kosinski about the Trump administration.
Kosinski married her husband, philanthropist Kimbell Duncan, in 2014. Darroch married his wife, Vanessa Darroch, in 1978.
Kosinski broke the news that then-CIA Director Mike Pompeo was set to become the next head of the State Department in February 2018. President Donald Trump appointed Pompeo to that position the following April. Kosinski immediately reported that Pompeo was considering a plan to travel to North Korea to lobby for the release of three American citizens, but that trip ultimately didn’t pan out.
“It was believed that no one on the U.S. side would leak this information,” one source told The Sun. “It was critical for the American officials that this information did not get out. If it did, the North Koreans could have been spooked and the three Americans may never have been returned.”
That country did, ultimately, release the three hostages in early May 2018, just before the Trump administration’s first summit with North Korean officials and returned back to the U.S. with Pompeo.
Darroch served as the United Kingdom’s Ambassador to the United States from 2016-19. Kosinski started working for CNN in 2014, but left the network five months after Darroch’s resignation.
Kosinski on Twitter defended her reporting and said the Justice Department’s investigation had cleared her.
“A so-called ‘leak investigation’ found NO such leaking,” Kosinski wrote. “Meaning, for all those stories listed — that ‘sensitive’ information did not come from the former ambassador. Sounds like I had some good sources and did my job.”
“I broke a number of stories in the years I covered State,” she added. None of them — not one — contained incorrect information. Case in point — the Pompeo/North Korea information— all from inside his Trump’s own orbit. Every damn time.”
