Veteran journalist Bob Woodward said Sunday he recently learned the unverified Trump dossier appeared in an early draft of a U.S. intelligence community assessment on Russian election interference.
During a discussion on “Fox News Sunday,” Woodward suggested its inclusion was at the behest of the Central Intelligence Agency, but it was ultimately taken out after being reviewed by intelligence experts.
“What I found out recently, which was really quite surprising, the dossier, which really is got a lot of garbage in it and Mueller found that to be the case, early in building the intelligence community assessment on Russian interference in an early draft, they actually put the dossier on page two in kind of a breakout box,” Woodward said in a panel moderated by host Chris Wallace.
“I think it was the CIA pushing this,” he added. “Real intelligence experts looked at this and said no, this is not intelligence, this is garbage and they took it out. But in this process the idea that they would include something like that in one of the great stellar intelligence assessments as Mueller also found out is highly questionable. Needs to be investigated.”
[Related: Barr: Mueller report makes ‘clear’ Russia meddled in 2016 election]
Woodward’s suggestion that the CIA was pushing for the inclusion of the dossier in the intelligence assessment comes nearly a month after Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., said he was told former CIA Director John Brennan “insisted” the dossier be included in the report. “BREAKING: A high-level source tells me it was Brennan who insisted that the unverified and fake Steele dossier be included in the Intelligence Report … Brennan should be asked to testify under oath in Congress ASAP,” Paul tweeted.
Woodward also wrote about Brennan’s endorsement of the dossier in his book Fear. “The sources that Steele used for his dossier had not been polygraphed, which made their information uncorroborated, and potentially suspect,” Woodward wrote in the book published last year. “But Brennan said the information was in line with their own sources, in which he had great confidence.” A spokesman for Brennan insisted he never trusted the dossier, telling the Associated Press, “because it wasn’t corroborated intel.”
The declassified January 2017 report determined Russia had ordered an “influence campaign” to help President Trump get elected in 2016. There is no mention of the dossier, compiled by ex-British spy Christopher Steele, which contained salacious and unverified claims about Trump’s ties to Russia. It was used by the FBI obtain a series of Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrants to wiretap one-time Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.
Now that special counsel Robert Mueller has concluded his investigation into Russian meddling, finding no collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, allies of the president are eagerly anticipating the findings of several investigations looking into possible government surveillance abuse against Trump. Among them are investigations being conducted by Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz, Attorney General William Barr, and Senate Judiciary Chairman Lindsey Graham, R-S.C.
Brennan, a vocal critic of Trump, served as CIA director from 2013 to Jan. 20 2017, the day of Trump’s inauguration. He huddled with a group of House Democrats late last month.
