President Donald Trump cherrypicked claims by an investigative journalist to push back against a salacious dossier linking him to Russia.
The president quoted portions of an interview with Yahoo News reporter Michael Isikoff, who conceded that some of the most outrageous details reported by former British spy Christopher Steele might never be proven.
"Russia Dossier reporter now doubts dopey Christopher Steele’s claims!" Trump tweeted.
Trump quoted the journalist's remarks from John Ziegler's Free Speech Broadcasting podcast, which were reported by Fox News and other conservative outlets.
“When you get into the details of the Steele Dossier, the specific allegations, we have not seen the evidence to support them," Isikoff said, according to Trump's tweets and capitalization. "There’s good grounds to think that some of the more sensational allegations WILL NEVER BE PROVEN AND ARE LIKELY FALSE.”
Many of the claims originally found in Steele's dossier have been backed by evidence turned up by special counsel Robert Mueller, and former federal prosecutor Chuck Rosenberg and Harvard Law student Sarah Grant said those findings essentially confirm “both specifically and thematically” aspects of the dossier.
The most salacious claim made in Steele's dossier, regarding allegations about Trump directing Russian prostitutes to urinate on a Moscow hotel bed where Barack Obama and his wife had once slept, has not yet been proven.
The dossier suggests that Russian president Vladimir Putin may have recorded evidence of that dalliance that he uses to blackmail the U.S. president.
Isikoff, however, agreed that "Steele was clearly onto something," broadly speaking, and said the Kremlin had interfered with the 2016 campaign to help Trump and had contacts with multiple associates of the president -- but Trump ignored those statements to claim vindication.
"Thank you to Michael Isikoff, Yahoo, for honesty," Trump tweeted. "What this means is that the FISA WARRANTS and the whole Russian Witch Hunt is a Fraud and a Hoax which should be ended immediately. Also, it was paid for by Crooked Hillary & DNC!"
