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Holes poked in @CNN report blaming Trump for alarm that led to extraction of Kremlin informant, when, in fact, the media is to blame #FactsFirst washex.am/2ZOfPRr
CNN's @jimsciutto reported the informant was extracted in 2017 after Trump met with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and then-Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak in the Oval Office in May 2017 and disclosed some classified information about an anti-ISIS operation in Syria.
Although CNN mentioned that concerns for the informant's safety dated back to the end of the Obama administration, the report stressed that Trump's actions were the inciting incident to revisit prior conversations.
But the New York Times tells a different story and led to Sciutto to acknowledge there is more than what he initially reported.
The report said media inquiries about CIA sources, following the U.S. intelligence community's detailed statements blaming Putin for directing the election interference effort, prompted officials to worry about the informant's safety and led to an offer for extraction in 2016.
The informant initially refused, citing concerns about family. Some American counterintelligence officials took this as a reason to be skeptical of the source's trustworthiness.
Months later, after Trump's meeting with Lavrov and Kislyak, there was more media scrutiny and the informant accepted another offer for extraction, reassuring U.S. officials who had begun to doubt this individual.
Former intelligence officials said "there was no public evidence that Mr. Trump directly endangered the source" and current U.S. officials "insisted that media scrutiny of the agency’s sources alone was the impetus for the extraction," according to the Times.
