httpss://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w6cBewazRXY
BuzzFeed on Tuesday published a 35-page dossier comprising a series of memos, containing intelligence reportedly gatd by a former British intelligence agent as opposition research, about alleged ties between President-elect Donald Trump and Russia.
No one had published its entire, stunning contents before Tuesday-partly because, as my colleague Joshua Keating put it, “Nothing in the memos has been confirmed, and even their provenance is murky.”
BuzzFeed posted the dossier in full, prefacing it with a series of caveats about its veracity and updating it shortly afterward with a vehement denial from Trump’s attorney Michael Cohen, about whom the memo makes several claims.
Smith didn’t address why BuzzFeed waited until now to publish the document, and he declined to comment further for this article.
That top U.S. intelligence officials saw fit to brief Trump and Obama on the dossier would seem to indicate that they took the claims at least somewhat seriously, even though they’ve been unable to verify them and, as BuzzFeed noted, the memos contain some “Clear errors.” But CNN’s report suggests that the briefing was partly just about making Trump aware that the dossier existed and was circulating at the highest levels of the U.S. government.
CNN declined to disclose the substance of the claims, writing, “At this point, CNN is not reporting on details of the memos, as it has not independently corroborated the specific allegations.” Smith and BuzzFeed saw it differently.
BuzzFeed presumably published it in part because CNN was reporting on it.
For now I’ll just point out that, while Smith has at times proudly positioned BuzzFeed as a member of the “Mainstream media,” he was acting in a different tradition.
It rings just a tad disingenuous when BuzzFeed claims to have published the documents simply “So that Americans can make up their own minds” about the allegations.