Did the FBI Trump Squad Discuss The Dossier with CNN?

Sean Davis looks through the emails, and thinks FBI officials -- Andrew McCabe especially -- were very familiar with CNN's thinking.

These emails were sent shortly after the Dossier Briefing, which supposedly was for the purposes of informing Trump about the "salacious and unverified" allegations in the dossier but which had actually been engineered in order to give CNN the "news hook" CNN told Brennan, Clapper, or whoever they needed to run the story.

Two days after the briefing, on January 8, 2017, former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe, who earlier this year was fired and then referred for criminal prosecution by the DOJ inspector general for repeatedly lying about media leaks, wrote an e-mail to top FBI officials with the subject, "Flood is coming."

"CNN is close to going forward with the sensitive story," McCabe wrote to Comey, Rybicki, and two others. "The trigger for them is they know the material was discussed in the brief and presented in an attachment." He did not detail how he came to know what CNN’s "trigger" was for publishing the dossier briefing story.

Although the January 10 story from CNN also claimed that Trump was presented with a two-page summary of the dossier, which was not part of the official intelligence community assessment given to Trump, Comey himself later claimed that he did not give the two-page document to Trump, raising questions about whether McCabe himself was a source for CNN’s assertion that Trump had been given the entire two-page document during the briefing.

John Sexton of Hot Air emphasizes the #FakeNews about Trump being given a two-page summary of the dossier even more.

Remember, Comey says he never gave Trump any summary. In fact, he barely even briefed him on the dossier at all -- he only mentioned the "salacious" parts about the prostitutes, not any of the other stuff. He didn't even tell Trump that there was a "dossier." Just that there were reports.

That background established:

The big takeaway here is that two days after the briefing took place, someone had leaked word of it to CNN. Not only that but Andrew McCabe knew word of the briefing had leaked and that CNN was about to publish. It doesn't appear from the description of his emails that he was a) surprised or b) concerned about the leak so soon after the briefing. So far as we know, no one at the FBI was pounding a desk demanding to know who gave CNN exactly what it was looking for.

CNN would publish a story two days later and that story would still contain the inaccurate claim that Trump was presented with a two-page summary of the dossier during the briefing. According to Comey, that never happened, but someone told CNN it had. It's probably not a coincidence that the claim that a summary was handed to the President-elect, though not true, seems designed to give CNN the news hook it needed.

Ron Johnson is on it:

posted by Ace of Spades at 03:11 PM

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