CNN: Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper responds to reports the law firm for the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee helped fund the research into the now-infamous dossier of allegations about the now-President and Russia.





ERIN BURNETT, CNN: He just now refers to it as the fake dossier which is why I want to make the point that some of it has been corroborated. But far from all of it, do you think some or most of it is true or would we know that by now?



JAMES CLAPPER, FORMER DIRECTOR OF NATIONAL INTELLIGENCE: Well, I don't know that. First, I do want to comment on the pedigree of the financing, the audit trail there. When we did our Intelligence Committee assessment, we were aware that the -- there had been research done and that some Republican candidates as a matter of fact had contracted through I think Fusion GPS to obtain what it later became much known as a dossier.







BURNETT: So Clinton paid for part of it but it had been started and paid by Republicans?



CLAPPER: That work as I understand was handed off later to the DNC and the Clinton campaign. So I think this is something that bears an audit trail by experts in finances that can track the auditing for this, and to see who was responsible for it.



I think with respect to the dossier itself, the key thing is doesn't matter who paid for it. It's what the dossier said and the extent to which it was -- it's corroborated or not. We had some concerns about it from the standpoint of its sourcing which we couldn't corroborate.



But at the same time, some of the substantive content, not all of it, but some of the substantive content of the dossier, we were able to corroborate in our Intelligence Community assessment which from other sources in which we had very high confidence to it.