CNN’s Sciutto Defends Russia ‘Bombshell’ Amid NYT, WaPo Debunking

RUSH TRANSCRIPT:
SCIUTTO: "Let’s talk about this source. More details we can report this morning. A Russian asset, a spy really, who had served as an informant for the CIA for more than a decade reached the highest levels of Russia’s national security infrastructure and had access to the president to take photographs of presidential documents. This individual’s intelligence was key to the Intel community’s assessment that when Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election, they did so at the direction of the Russian president. And the intention was not just to disrupt American Politics but to advantage Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton. So a very key source at the highest levels who is now lost to the U.S. And that’s a significant loss. A little background here. We should be clear the concerns about the safety of this source prior to the extraction developed over months. It was first during the end of the Obama Administration when the source was offered extraction. The administration became concerned, precisely because intelligence from the source was included in that assessment of Russian interference in the election. But those concerns grew during the early months of the Trump Administration and I’m told by a former Trump Administration official directly involved in the discussions of this extraction that the president’s repeated mishandling of classified intelligence contributed to that decision to take this person out."