The Extraordinary Rebuke Of CNN By Central Intelligence Agency And New York Times

Jim Sciutto was a political appointee of President Obama working on foreign affairs when he was hired by CNN in 2013 to be its Chief National Security Correspondent.  The network never disclosed this fact to its viewers.

Scuitto reported on CNN’s air the CIA had extracted a Russian asset over concerns President Trump had mishandled classified information that might “somehow reveal details about intelligence operations.”

Scant hours after CNN’s reporting, the New York Times cited sources contradicting the story writing, “CIA officials made the arduous decision in late 2016 [emphasis mine] to offer to extract the source from Russia weeks before [emphasis mine] Trump even took office.”

The informant, recruited by the CIA decades ago, has been described as a mid-level Russian official who was outside Vladimir Putin's inner circle, and yet saw Putin on a regular basis and was privy to high-level information. This Moscow spy's intel was key to the U.S. intelligence community's conclusion that Putin himself ordered a Russian interference campaign in the U.S. 2016 election.

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.

The asset was offered extraction in 2016 over concerns about his safety but refused causing some American counterintelligence officials to become skeptical of his trustworthiness.

Even publicly there was talk that CNN's report missed the mark. Former CIA official Philip Mudd, a CNN counterterrorism analyst, took issue with the report's "political angle" involving President Trump.

“I question whether this angle of the story about whether the President’s engagement with intelligence was actually a spur in the extraction of the informant," Mudd said Monday on The Lead with Jake Tapper. "I suspect there were other issues here."

CIA spokeswoman Brittany Bramell said, "CNN's narrative that the Central Intelligence Agency makes life-or-death decisions based on anything other than objective analysis and sound collection is simply false. Misguided speculation that the President's handling of our nation's most sensitive intelligence — which he has access to each and every day — drove an alleged exfiltration operation is inaccurate.”

Numerous other holes quickly surfaced in CNN's reporting. Commentator Aaron Mate pointed out in a Twitter thread that several major news organizations had previously cited a high-level official in the Russian government as a source — suggesting the Intelligence Community itself, not Trump, had compromised the spy.

NYT now reporting that @jimsciutto's core claim -- that CIA extracted a Russian source in part due to worries about "Trump’s handling of intelligence -- is bunk. Current & former officials blame media leaks -- that came from the intel community itself. https://t.co/AFKXbXap41 pic.twitter.com/JVz5XIZbob

— Aaron Maté (@aaronjmate) September 10, 2019