Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper is shrugging off news that the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee funded the research behind the dossier on Donald Trump.
Clapper said the only thing that matters is whether the information is “corroborated.”
“With respect to the dossier itself, the key thing is it doesn’t matter who paid for it,” Clapper told Erin Burnett on “OutFront” Wednesday night. “It’s what the dossier said and the extent to which it’s corroborated or not.”
Clinton herself has said she was not aware of the dossier.
Clapper told CNN that he believes the U.S. intelligence community was able to validate portions of the dossier that suggest Trump exercised little political acumen while in Russia.
“We had some concerns about it from the standpoint of its sourcing, which we couldn’t corroborate — but at the same time, some of the substantive content, not all of it, but some, we were able to corroborate in our intelligence community assessment from other sources,” he said.
Despite saying he doesn’t care who put up the money for the dossier, Clapper was suggesting that an “audit trail” could substantiate who actually did pay for it — although that seems to have been already demonstrated.
“When we did our intelligence committee assessment, we were aware that there had been research done and that some Republican candidates, as a matter of fact, had contracted through Fusion GPS to obtain what it later became known as the dossier,” Clapper noted, adding that the project was then transferred to the DNC and Hillary for America.
“This is something that bears an audit trail by experts in finances that can track the auditing for this,” he suggested to CNN, because that would enable investigators “to see who was responsible for it.”
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