If that wasn’t enough to debunk CNN’s reporting, Wemple pointed out a report by CNN correspondent Evan Perez on the link between the dossier and Special counsel Robert S. Mueller’s investigation on October 6, 2017:
Now we don’t know what information Steele may provide to Mueller’s team, but we do know that Steele has previously provided the FBI with some information to try to verify some of the sources that he used to put together the dossier.We’re also learning that late last year top officials at the FBI, and the CIA, and the Director of National Intelligence actually discussed including parts of the Steele dossier in the official intelligence document on Russian meddling.Sources tell us that the intelligence community didn’t want to include it because they didn’t want to explain what parts of the dossier that they had been able to corroborate. And they also were concerned about revealing sources and methods that they had used to do so.So, while the President Trump calls the dossier a hoax, it appears that his intelligence agencies have a vastly different view.
That does not square with Horowitz’s report which said that the intelligence agencies didn’t even have a unified “view” on including the dossier in the Mueller report.
According to the Intel Section Chief and Supervisory Intel Analyst, as the interagency editing process for the ICA progressed, the CIA expressed concern about using the Steele election reporting in the text of the ICA. The Supervisory Intel Analyst explained that the CIA believed that the Steele election reporting was not completely vetted and did not merit inclusion in the body of the report. The Intel Section Chief stated that the CIA viewed it as “internet rumor.”
Wemple concludes:
The final assessment relegated an abridgment of the dossier to an appendix. To keep its distance from the document, then-Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr. issued a statement saying that the intelligence community “has not made any judgment that the information in this document is reliable, and we did not rely upon it in any way for our conclusions.” In their famous Jan. 6, 2017, briefing with Trump at Trump Tower, the intelligence chiefs presented their findings on Russian meddling, followed by a session focused on the dossier with Trump and then-FBI Director James B. Comey. In a subsequent appearance on Fox News, author and investigative reporter Bob Woodward said, “That is a garbage document. It never should have been presented as part of an intelligence briefing.”
Woodward, who knows a thing or two about presidential conspiracies, deserves credit for bucking the liberal mindset and blasting the dossier, unlike CNN, which hired former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, who lobbied for the inclusion of the dossier in the Mueller report.
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