Pablo Guzman, whose 2001 report for WCBS in New York has been cited by Donald Trump as backing up his claim of seeing thousands of Muslims cheering the 9/11 attacks, says the footage shows no such thing.
Guzman's original report cites allegations of eight people on a Jersey City rooftop, but Guzman told BuzzFeed News on Wednesday the story he filed was based on early speculation from law enforcement sources, and they turned out to be wrong.
Guzman said that there were people in the New Jersey Muslim community who were happy the attacks happened and that he had interviewed some of them, but he said they were outcasts from the greater Muslim population.
"As far as Trump citing the report, I think that they’re trying to find ways to back up that claim, but if you go into the report at the time and since, no one was saying thousands of people," Guzman told BuzzFeed. "I mean, the report that I did was an honest report. And it was based on tremendous sources in the law enforcement community and what they were feeling at that time."
Guzman said all reporters were getting calls from the public saying there are people on roofs celebrating, but it seems to have been a rumor circulating and building like a "game of telephone."
"There wasn't anything to support that there were co-conspirators living in Jersey City ready and waiting and, when it happened, cheering, or even that there were thousands of people that were sympathetic to that loss of life," he said. "Were there were some people? Yeah, and they were the kind of people that you wouldn’t want to be in a room with."
As for reports of someone having an architectural model of the World Trade Center on a roof, that turned out to be a parent showing children how the attack could have happened, and wasn't someone with foreknowledge of the attacks, Guzman said.
Guzman said that Trump’s statement did contain a "grain of truth."
But, he added, "I'm not gonna say nobody cheered. I don’t believe that. I talked to people that I never want to talk to again who thought this was a good thing."
Guzman said Trump sometimes goes off "without a filter" then is called out "for certain specifics, generalizations, or exaggerations.
"Then [his campaign] doesn’t wanna make him look bad, so they say, 'Wait, wait, look at what this reporter said then,'" he said. "Well, yeah, then, at that time, this is what we knew, this is what we had. And I stand by that."
Trump has stood by his claims even as media outlets say there is no evidence to support them.
"There were a lot of happy people over in New Jersey," Trump told a crowd in Waterville, N.H., Tuesday night,
CBS News reports.
"And I saw it and a lot of people saw it, and I'm getting hundreds of phone calls and a lot of other people are too, and things are all of a sudden materializing. So people said you should apologize. I said I don't apologize. Hey look, if I'm wrong about something, I want to apologize."
Later that night, Trump adviser Daniel Scavino tweeted out a 15-second news clip from a 2001 CBS affiliate report to back up the story.
On Tuesday, Trump also tweeted out a short video clip of radio host Curtis Sliwa from two days after the attack:
But Sliwa countered the clip was "edited" and that there were only "a handful of people" celebrating.
CBS notes that earlier in the week, there were references to MTV News coverage after 9/11 providing evidence of "thousands" of people cheering the attacks. But on Tuesday, MTV News republished the full news report that showed a young New Jersey resident saying she saw "13, maybe 14 at most" teenagers celebrating.