Apparently Trump Campaign Manager and newly christened Senior Advisor (whatever that means) Kellyanne Conway didn’t read the headlines in The New York Times, Washington Post, and on CNN between yesterday afternoon and yesterday evening.
The story at this point is that Trump was briefed by intelligence officials last week about the information contained in the 35-page report released by BuzzFeed. Specifically, the reporting is that Trump and President Obama were briefed on a two-page summary of (presumably) the most reliable information from the larger report produced as part of opposition research work that was done on Trump months ago — opposition research that was commissioned by both Democrats and Republicans because they had concerns about Trump’s background.
Given that the leaders of the major intelligence agencies thought that at least some of the material in the dossier was valid and verified enough to include and be reported to the President and the President-elect, then it cannot be easily tossed out as fake.
Conway made this ludicrous claim when speaking with Seth Meyers on his show January 10: “As an American citizen regardless of political party, Conway said, “we should be concerned that intelligence officials leak to the press and won’t go and tell the president-elect or the president of the United States himself now, Mr. Obama, what the information is. They’d rather go tell the press.”
Meyers called her on that lie.
The key point of the reporting right now is that both the president/elect and the president were briefed on this information last week. It’s not going to look good for Trump if several chief intelligence officials say that they briefed Trump on this information during last week’s meeting and Trump says that they didn’t. At this point he has not yet acknowledged that he was briefed on the two pages of information, and Conway tried to mislead people about it last night.