It looks like CNN has bungled another Russia scoop. Shocking, I know.
The network claimed Monday that the U.S. government “extracted [a] top spy from inside Russia in 2017,” a decision that CNN alleges was driven “in part, by concerns that President Donald Trump and his administration repeatedly mishandled classified intelligence and could contribute to exposing the covert source as a spy.”
CNN’s reporting stresses the extraction took place in 2017 shortly after the president “discussed highly classified intelligence with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and then-Russian Ambassador to the U.S. Sergey Kislyak. The intelligence, concerning ISIS in Syria, had been provided by Israel.” The network alleges further that “the removal happened at a time of wide concern in the intelligence community about mishandling of intelligence by Trump and his administration.”
The implication is clear: Because of incidents like his 2017 meeting with Lavrov and Kislyak, Trump compromised a high-level CIA asset, costing the American intelligence community an invaluable informant embedded deep within the Russian government. That is certainly the takeaway CNN’s readers got from Monday’s report, which was authored by chief national security correspondent and former Obama administration official Jim Sciutto.
However, follow-up reporting from the New York Times and the Washington Post suggests the cable network both omitted and botched key, thesis-altering details in its original scoop. Namely, the Times alleges the CIA’s efforts to extract the informant date back to 2016, before Trump was even sworn in as president. The Times claims also that the American press, not the Trump administration, was responsible for compromising the informant’s cover.
C.I.A. officials worried about safety made the arduous decision in late 2016 to offer to extract the source from Russia. The situation grew more tense when the informant at first refused, citing family concerns — prompting consternation at C.I.A. headquarters and sowing doubts among some American counterintelligence officials about the informant’s trustworthiness. But the C.I.A. pressed again months later after more media inquiries. This time, the informant agreed.
The Washington Post flatly contradicts CNN’s story, stating that Trump’s 2017 disclosure of classified information to Lavrov and Kislyak “was not the reason for the decision to remove the CIA asset.” It never made sense anyway that a high-level, covert source in Russia would have been compromised by intelligence gathered by Israeli officials. The Times similarly contradicts CNN’s characterization of events, reporting that, “former intelligence officials said there was no public evidence that Mr. Trump directly endangered the source, and other current American officials insisted that media scrutiny of the agency’s sources alone was the impetus for the extraction.
We are a long way off now from CNN’s original framing of the story, which suggested the Trump administration’s mishandling of classified information in 2017 prompted the hasty and deadly necessary extraction of a key Russian informant.
Sciutto, for his part, is standing by his story.
“Given NYT has now made details on Russian spy public, I can now report additional info we had withheld. Asset had direct access to Vladimir Putin, including the remarkable ability to take photos of presidential documents, and had served U.S. for more than a decade,” he tweeted Monday evening.
He added, “Asset had risen to the highest levels of Russia’s national security infrastructure. U.S. offered extraction months earlier during Obama administration, but asset refused. Asset’s information was crucial to [intelligence community’s] assessment that Putin had directed election interference to favor Trump.”
Curiously enough, neither the original nor the updated version of Sciutto’s article makes any mention of the CIA reportedly offering to extract the Russian asset in 2016, during the Obama administration.
What readers are left with is this: two reports from two competing newsrooms throwing cold water on what appears to be a very misleading CNN scoop. Basically, choose whom you want to believe. But considering the national press’ unflattering track record of covering Russia in the Trump era, it is also possible that everyone is wrong. Hell, the supposed asset may not even be real. Fool me once, and all that.
