Rep. Adam Schiff admitted in a CNN interview Tuesday that parts of the disputed "dossier" were not true, including a key allegation made against President Trump’s lawyer.
Schiff told CNN interviewer Alisyn Camerota that President Donald Trump's personal attorney and long-time Trump Organization official Michael Cohen was never in Prague.
The dossier compiled by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele asserted that Cohen had travelled to Prague to covertly meet with Russian agents.
Schiff, who is the House Intelligence Committee's ranking Democrat, said that members of the committee were making the argument that the FISA court saw the salacious, uncorroborated material because they "haven't read the underlying materials."
"So one of my colleagues, for example, said, well, we don't have evidence that Michael Cohen made a trip to Prague. This is also part of the dossier," Schiff said. "But that Michael Cohen trip to Prague wasn't part of the materials provided to the FISA court. So it's very disingenuous to say the FISA court was misled because we don't believe Michael Cohen went to Prague when that information was never provided to the court."
Cohen, Trump's personal attorney and close confidant, has traveled three times to Europe recently, but strongly denied the claim in the dossier he met secretly with a Russian official in Prague. Cohen has stated he never visited Prague.
"While I understand the need for and appreciate those working to uncover Russia's purported interference in our democratic process, neither I nor the President had any involvement," Cohen told Newsmax Tuesday night. He added, "Truth is truth."
Schiff said that salacious portions of the dossier produced by Steele were not provided to the FISA court when the FBI applied for a warrant for surveillance on one-time Trump campaign aide Carter Page.
"The only parts of the dossier that were important were those that pertained to Carter Page. And some of that was corroborated," Schiff said.
A GOP-written memo released by the committee last week said the warrant obtained by the FBI to monitor Page was done so by using unsubstantiated information in the anti-Trump dossier, which was paid, in part, by the campaign of Democrat Hillary Clinton.
The same committee on Monday voted unanimously to release the Democratic counter-memo, sending it to the White House for a legal and national security review. The document, produced by Schiff, rebuts GOP allegations that the FBI abused surveillance laws.
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