WaPo's Eric Wemple notes that CNN went with the 'GOP seizes' route on newly disclosed footnotes on Steele dossier

If you’ve been keeping up with Twitchy this week, you’ll know we’ve had a handful of treads on newly declassified footnotes from Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s report on FISA abuses in relation to the investigation into collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, footnotes that refer frequently to the discredited Steele dossier.

CBS News’ Catherine Herridge has been putting her pen and highlighter to excellent use, noting that the Russians were using Christopher Steele to spread disinformation, and there was an excellent thread by John Huber noting that in the declassified footnotes, we learn publically for the first time that Steele had written a report citing a Yahoo News article for which he was the anonymous source.

Amid all the COVID-19 noise, the newly declassified footnotes didn’t escape the Washington Post’s Eric Wemple, who wondered what CNN and MSNBC were going to have to say about them.

Opinion: The Steele dossier just sustained another body blow. What do CNN and MSNBC have to say? https://t.co/Pcg7VN4p6x

— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) April 18, 2020

CNN: "The ends justify the means."

— Mequon Assassin (@mequonassassin) April 18, 2020

Wemple tells us what CNN had to say … Republicans seized:

We’ll pause to consider the CNN account, which carries the headline, “GOP seizes on newly declassified material to raise further questions about Steele dossier.” The article’s first sentence reads, “Senate Republicans are touting newly declassified information that suggests Russian disinformation, in two instances, may have been passed onto ex-British intelligence agent Christopher Steele when he compiled an opposition research dossier on Donald Trump and Russia in 2016.”

Factual? Yes. Slanted? Yes, that too. Republicans are “touting” the footnotes in part because media outlets such as CNN, MSNBC and others “touted” the dossier with flimsy corroboration in the early months of the Trump presidency. (The chatter is the focus of previous installments in this series.) One CNN anchor, for instance, went so far as to assert in December 2017 that the U.S. intelligence community has “corroborated all the details” of the dossier.

The CNN footnote story abridges the findings of the Horowitz report this way: “Steele’s report played no role in the opening of the FBI investigation, according to Horowitz, and he found that the most salacious allegations weren’t proven.” That’s a convenient formulation, considering that the Horowitz report said the FBI determined that the dossier was a mix of uncorroborated, inaccurate/inconsistent and publicly available information.

ONE opinion piece that talks about the Steele dossier and Democrats lose their minds. Read the replies.

You’d think @washingtonpost was Alex Jones to some of these people.

The ignorance is astounding. They have no idea what’s happening. https://t.co/r3BFTFccTV

— Guy Pendleton (@guyppendleton) April 18, 2020

The Washington Post has a Conservative problem.

— John McKenzie (@BestMckenzie239) April 18, 2020

Yeah, that’s it, the paper that employs Max Boot and Jennifer Rubin to write conservative columns has a conservative problem.

Related:

‘They knew … and they LIED!’ Undercover Huber’s newest Steele dossier/FISA thread even MORE damning for FBI https://t.co/iAAuJA04HT

— Twitchy Team (@TwitchyTeam) April 17, 2020