Catherine (@CBS_Herridge) this is irresponsible and misleading. It's a heavily redacted, undated, partial transcript of a chat in which Papadopoulos admits the Trump campaign *knows it's under FBI surveillance*—of *course* he's going to deny everything and say it'd be "illegal."
1/ When one reads the transcript (what parts of it can even be read, given the many redactions, and it's not even close to complete), one sees that *everything* in the transcript that explains why law enforcement would *not* consider it significant was left out of the CBS report.
2/ Moreover, it's undated—and CBS declines to offer a date even though that's critical. Comey reopened the Clinton case 11 days pre-election—and most heard of it 10 days pre-election. Papadopoulos knew as of this recording—which could be as many as 14 days pre-election. Holy cow!
3/ In other words, it's entirely possible that the newsworthy content in this transcript is redacted, cut off—because the transcript suddenly ends at page 4, when Weiner comes up—or would be revealed if we knew the *date* of the chat. So *why* is this being presented in this way?
4/ Moreover, throughout Papadopoulos parrots what the FBI already *knew* was the Trump campaign "line": someone hacked besides the Russians (even though Trump knew otherwise by August 17, at the very latest); Putin's claim it's all a conspiracy theory should be heeded; and so on.
5/ There was no indicia of reliability or probative value in that conversation, given Papadopoulos' repeating of lines the campaign had already established, and his acknowledgment he was aware of FBI surveillance being a risk to anyone on the campaign speaking about these issues.
6/ But it's much worse than that: Papadopoulos is lying throughout the conversation, and the FBI would have known that. Why? Because multiple allied nations had told U.S. intel agencies that Papadopoulos knew Russia favored Trump. But in this audio, he says he *didn't* know that.
7/ So why should law enforcement view as *exculpatory* a transcript in which they know the witness is lying start to finish? You've positioned this transcript as exculpatory—but anyone who's researched and written on the relevant events knows that it's in fact quite the opposite.
8/ Indeed, the 8 to 10 lies Papadopoulos tells here that the FBI would've known were lies only confirm his criminal intent to cover up Trump campaign contacts with Russia. So why is this article positioning this content as some sort of indignant, reliable confession of innocence?
9/ He even lies about *little* things—like whether he *knows Trump's Russia policy*. (He'd just published a detailed description of it in Russia media! And now he says, "no one knows"? *What*?) It's this sort of sloppy reporting that undermined the gravity of this entire scandal.
10/ This story caters to stupid people who haven't read Mueller's report. It feeds them—by misframing its own reporting—exactly the totally unsupported narrative they already believe. I can't believe this article, as written, got past the editors as CBS. I'm sorry—it's abhorrent.
PS/ My full count of Papadopoulos' lies here is 12. Twelve lies in 4 heavily redacted, undated, incomplete-transcript pages of text that CBS News then cherry-picked to make it sound like the righteous indignation of a man—a *felon*, I might add—wrongfully suspected of wrongdoing.
PS2/ I was a criminal investigator and defense lawyer—and I don't see a credible claim this is exculpatory. No FISA app said the campaign had confessed to meddling—the FISA judge knew the campaign line Papadopoulos was parroting and would've rightly seen this doc as full of lies.
