Bob Woodward: FBI & CIA Handling of Steele Dossier ‘Needs to Be Investigated’

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Bob Woodward says FBI and CIA handling of Steele dossier needs to be thoroughly investigated

Legendary investigative reporter Bob Woodward says the FBI and CIA’s reliance on the discredited Steele dossier “needs to be investigated” now that the Mueller report has debunked many of the document’s claims.

Speaking with Fox News’ Chris Wallace on Sunday, Woodward stated that the dossier “has got lots of garbage in it.”

Daily Caller reports: Woodward said that he recently learned that the CIA included outtakes from the dossier in a draft of the January 2017 intelligence community assessment that laid out Russian interference in the 2016 presidential campaign.

“What I found out recently, which was really quite surprising, the dossier, which really has got a lot of garbage in it and Mueller found that to be the case, early in building the intelligence community assessment on Russian interference, in an early draft, they actually put the dossier on page two in kind of a breakout box.”

“I think it was the CIA pushing this. Real intelligence experts looked at this and said no, this is not intelligence, this is garbage and they took it out,” said Woodward.

“But in this process, the idea that they would include something like that in one of the great stellar intelligence assessments, as Mueller also found out, is highly questionable.”

“Needs to be investigated.”

The special counsel’s report, released Thursday, undercut a key claim from the dossier about Michael Cohen, the former Trump attorney. Steele alleged that Cohen visited Prague in August 2016 to meet with Kremlin insiders as part of a conspiracy to influence the election.

But Mueller’s report said explicitly that Cohen has never visited Prague.

“Cohen had never traveled to Prague and was not concerned about those allegations, which he believed were provably false,” the report says.

Mueller did not issue any conspiracy indictments during his investigation, even though the dossier alleges a “well-developed conspiracy” between the Trump team and Russia.

The Justice Department’s inspector general is reportedly investigating the FBI’s handling of the dossier, which was used to obtain surveillance warrants against former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.

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