Fox News’ Martha MacCallum grilled Democratic California Rep. Eric Swalwell on Tuesday night after he claimed that the Steele dossier was factually sound.
MacCallum began by questioning old statements Swalwell made, in which he claimed to have seen evidence that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia.
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“So it doesn’t bother you that the Clinton campaign paid for a dossier to be put together by someone who had all kinds of ties to intelligence and put together something that turned out to be not necessarily factual,” MacCallum asked.
“Which part of it hasn’t been proven factual?” Swalwell responded, to which the show host answered, “Are you serious?”
“You think the dossier — for one thing, Michael Cohen said he never went to Prague,” she added. “There were basically a few main tenets of it. One of them was the salacious story about what happened in a hotel. None of that has proved to be factual. The meeting that Cohen supposedly took in Prague was also proved to not have happened. He testified [to] that under oath in front of Congress.”
Swalwell stated, “Now you accept with what Michael Cohen said? Because if you accept what Michael Cohen said about Prague, then I think you also have to accept that Michael Cohen saw Donald Trump talk to Roger Stone, where Roger Stone said the Wikileaks attack is happening. So if you are accepting that, then you accept that Donald Trump knew about the Russian interference campaign and that is the issue here, Martha.”
Michael Cohen, U.S. President Donald Trump’s former attorney, exits the United States Court house after his sentencing, in the Manhattan borough of New York City, New York, U.S., December 12, 2018. REUTERS/Shannon Stapleton
“You can be on record as standing by what was found in the dossier and I think there is a lot of evidence to refute that,” MacCallum added.
The California congressman retorted, “You can’t hold up to Michael Cohen to be a saint when he said he didn’t go to Prague, but then say he’s lying when he said he heard Roger Stone.”
As MacCallum pointed out, the dossier claimed that Cohen visited Prague to pay off hackers — was disputed by the former Trump attorney himself during a sworn congressional hearing in February.
McClatchy reported in April 2018 that special counsel Robert Mueller had evidence of Cohen’s visit to Prague. The report, which relied on unnamed sources, appeared to confirm the claim in the dossier about Cohen’s trip. (RELATED: 7 Collusion Theories That Died With The Mueller Report)
They are standing by the report that Cohen went to Prague even after Cohen said he’s never been to the country and despite the fact that Mueller found no proof of collusion, last week.
Michael Isikoff and David Corn, the two journalists most closely linked to the Steele dossier, acknowledged Monday that much of the dossier was contradicted by the conclusion of the Mueller probe.