Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said Wednesday that whether Democrats or Republicans paid for the unsubstantiated Russian dossier on President Donald Trump was irrelevant if its contents can be "corroborated."
"With respect to the dossier itself, the key thing is it doesn't matter who paid for it," Clapper told Erin Burnett on CNN. "It's what the dossier said and the extent to which it was corroborated or not."
The Washington Post reported Tuesday the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee picked up the financing for the document after the initial Republican funder stopped paying Fusion GPS for its work.
Clapper told Burnett intelligence officials verified some of the dossier's contents.
"We had some concerns about it from the standpoint of its sourcing — 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 also called for an "audit trail" by investigators to determine who exactly paid for the unverified document.
"When we did our intelligence committee assessment, we were aware that there had been research done and that some Republican candidates had contracted through Fusion GPS to obtain what it later became known as a dossier," Clapper said.
"That work was handed off later to the DNC and the Clinton campaign.
"This is something that bears an audit trail by experts in finances that can track the auditing for this," he told Burnett. "And to see who was responsible for it."
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