Certainly, the impression that President-elect Donald Trump gives in public is that he is upset with prominent online news site BuzzFeed for publishing an alleged dossier full of salacious details that Russian intelligence was allegedly planning to use to compromise him. Furiously upset, even — going so far as to call them a “failing pile of garbage” in a defiant press conference Wednesday morning. And who knows, Trump’s anger might well be genuine; but he really ought to be thanking BuzzFeed for changing the course of this story in a way that has been very positive for him.
Rewind the clock to Tuesday afternoon and recall what Trump was facing. CNN anchor Jake Tapper, who enjoys one of the broadest bipartisan reputations for honesty of any person in the media, was on television, flanked by reporters Jim Sciutto, Evan Perez and Carl Bernstein. Tapper reported that CNN had developed credible information that U.S. intelligence officials had presented evidence to both Trump and outgoing President Barack Obama that Russian intelligence agents claimed to have compromising information about Trump “of both a personal and financial nature.” Further, the agents claimed that surrogates for the Trump campaign had regularly been in contact with Russian officials throughout 2016, directly contradicting Trump’s fierce denials of any such contact.
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