This week, in the latest of a series of CNN fake-news stories about Donald Trump and Russia, ex-Obama diplomat Jim Sciutto claimed a high-level CIA asset inside the Russian goverment had to be extracted to America because Trump's loose lips with the Russians endangered his life. Even after The New York Times reported a story undermining CNN's thesis, they pounded their collapsing story for hours.
On Friday, Wall Street Journal columnist Kimberley Strassel took a wider look at this trend and suggested this is another desperate effort by the media's Fusion/Collusion Corps that promoted the largely unsubstantiated Christopher Steele dossier to Get Trump:
A fight has since broken out over the reason the U.S. moved to extract the source. CNN (ludicrously) claims it is because President Donald Trump mishandled classified information. Every other outlet cites officials noting their concern that the U.S. media (in thrall to the collusion narrative) might blow the source’s cover. But this brouhaha is a side issue to the vastly more consequential point: There’s a reason this story is appearing now, and therefore a reason to doubt its full accuracy.
At the beginning of 2018, as Republicans prepared to expose the degree to which the Clinton-funded Steele dossier had informed the FBI’s Trump counterintelligence investigation, the leakers suddenly put out a new claim: It wasn’t the dossier that mattered but a curious episode involving a third-tier Trump aide named George Papadopoulos. When, in the spring of 2018, conservative media discovered that the FBI had employed a spy against the Trump campaign, the leakers got out ahead. The ensuing stories blew the identity of the (ahem) “informant,” and cast the spying in the most positive, patriotic light.
And hey, ho,here we are on the eve of a Justice Department inspector general’s report that may well render a dim view of the FBI’s decision to obtain surveillance warrants against U.S. citizens based on opposition research from the rival political campaign. And suddenly, the very same reporters and media outlets that brought us those collusion doozies are reporting (based, again, on anonymous “former” officials) that actually the U.S. intelligence community had far more than just a dossier! It had a supersecret Russian spy! Of course it knew what it was doing!
Even aside from the timing, there are reasons to be skeptical of these reports. Don’t forget, any number of Republicans were wary of Mr. Putin well before 2016, and were dogging CIA director John Brennan for details of the autocrat’s intentions. Congressional Republicans tell me they’ve never seen any intelligence product that suggests U.S. officials received regular reports from a highly placed Russian source on the subjects at issue.
Strassel suggested that if the Americans had a highly-placed source inside the Russian government, surely this source "would have been able to disavow what we now know are the dossier’s false claims of a sprawling Kremlin-Trump plot" (not to mention the pee tapes). If not, then this "superspy" wasn't very bright, or that high up in the government.
It’s possible the reports contain an element of truth—potentially blown up to provide cover for the rogue counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign. I have no direct reporting on the source. Yet the cynical decision to leak this information has already had grave consequences. Within a day, reporters were outside the D.C. home of a man assumed to be the source—in possession of his name, history and background. Western sources whose covers are blown go on to write books. Russian sources who defect or who are exposed as spies end up poisoned or dead. This is among the most egregious leaks in modern history.
One of those door-knockers was NBC's Ken Dilanian, which makes perfect sense since he is mocked as "Fusion Ken" by conservatives for promoting the Fusion GPS narratives and overdoing the collusion conspiracy theories. CNN's aggression here again should remind the public that CNN is packed with former Obama national-security and diplomatic personnel, which may have made for a very comfortable transition from anonymous source to paid analysts and reporters.
