Comey’s memos indicate dossier briefing of Trump was a setup

Newly released memos written by former FBI director James Comey indicate that an early 2017 briefing for then-President-elect Donald Trump about the contents of an infamous dossier was held so it could be leaked to media outlets eager to report on the dossier’s allegations. In multiple memos, Comey specifically mentioned that CNN had the dossier and wanted a “news hook” that would enable the network to report on its most salacious allegations even though they had not been verified…

No media organizations had reported the allegations at the time Comey briefed Trump.

“I said media like CNN had them and were looking for a news hook,” Comey added in his memo about the briefing with Trump on January 6, 2017…

Of the many thousands of articles promoting a still-unproven theory of treasonous collusion between President Donald Trump and Russia, few were as significant as CNN’s January 10 story “Intel chiefs presented Trump with claims of Russian efforts to compromise him.” Extremely well-placed sources told CNN that the Obama administration’s top intelligence appointees had briefed Obama, Biden, and Trump all about a dossier they took incredibly seriously and considered credible. And it sounded really bad, as the headline indicated.

“Russian operatives claim to have compromising personal and financial information about Mr. Trump,” CNN declared. BuzzFeed published the actual dossier within minutes of CNN’s story going live, showing the world that the dossier was riddled with salacious gossip that lacked even a possibility of corroboration…

Such a close-hold that someone at a very high level in the Obama administration gave the information to CNN almost immediately. CNN broke the news of the dossier and Comey’s briefing of the president just four days later.