Fox News’ chief political analyst tried to discredit a CNN report on how the Defense Department assessed the U.S. bombings on Iran as not as damaging as President Donald Trump has said.
Brit Hume followed Trump’s lead Wednesday in attacking Natasha Bertrand, CNN’s Pentagon and national security correspondent, after she and her colleagues broke the news that the Defense Intelligence Agency’s early finding was that the bombings only temporarily set back Iran’s enrichment program by months.
“We have reporters working on this story, one in particular who works for CNN, who is a person who fell for the Steele Dossier hook, line and sinker, who wrote that the Hunter Biden laptop—bought into the story that that was Russian disinformation,” Hume told Special Report anchor Bret Baier.
“She wasn’t working for CNN at the time,” he went on. “It’s not clear to me how she ever got a job there, but CNN took her anyway and now she is doing this kind of stuff.”
Some commentators have argued that while at Business Insider, Bertrand lent too much credence to the Steele Dossier, a 2016 unverified opposition research report by a former British intelligence officer about Trump, portions of which were later corroborated by the Mueller Report.
In 2020, Bertrand reported for Politico that dozens of former senior intelligence officials said the leak of emails allegedly written by Hunter Biden “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” No evidence has emerged to suggest that is the case, and some contents of Biden’s laptop have been authenticated.
CNN is standing by Bertrand and her colleagues’ story “100 percent.”
“CNN’s reporting made clear that this was an initial finding that could change with additional intelligence,” the network said in a statement. “We have extensively covered President Trump’s own deep skepticism about it.”
“However,” it added, “we do not believe it is reasonable to criticize CNN reporters for accurately reporting the existence of the assessment and accurately characterizing its findings, which are in the public interest.”
Hume himself acknowledged that the Pentagon’s report was preliminary, and that that was “the best thing you can say about it.”
“I think subsequent intelligence reports we have heard about are more reliable but, you know, this all has to await a longer-term situation which somebody is going to have to get in there and really find out,” he said. “But, Iranians themselves were saying today that the nuclear program was badly damaged. So maybe we ought to rest with that.”
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