It was as if an asteroid was on its way to CNN’s D.C. bureau on Friday when the Republican House Intelligence Committee memo was released as CNN analysts and reporters did everything in their power to dismiss the memo and defend Christopher Steele and Fusion GPS.

CNN chief political analyst Gloria Borger concocted perhaps the biggest pretzel of them all, dismissing the memo’s concerns about an anti-Trump, leftist bias by Steele and Fusion GPS that put together the dossier because, well, people rely on biased sources to get to the truth all the time.

Borger credited Shimon Prokupecz for pointing out to her that “informants are not always as clear as the snow” but, as former Republican Congressman Mike Rogers (Mich.) pointed out, was “just the opposite.”

“So you want to say, well, Steele was dealing with Democrats or was paid by Democrats. I mean, you can get good information from sources who come at you with a — with a bias one way or another, can't you,” Borger complained.

Sure, but doing Steele’s bidding for months and months using the shield of anonymous sources totally undermines Borger’s point. If he were as biased as you claim, might it have behooved CNN and others to make that clarification that your sources might have had axes to grind?

On cue, Rogers agreed:

Remember, you're actually — if you're paying an informant to give you information in a criminal organization, trust me, that person is committing or has committed crimes prior to that in order to get there. So their veracity is always a little bit in question. That's why you would filter in other aspects of this, which they don't tell you that information.

Following a meltdown earlier in the hour, CNN political director David Chalian trashed “Trump supporters” as seizing on the memo along with “the whole Fox News echo chamber, but they are going to point to...this political document from the majority staff in the House Intelligence Committee, that Steele was talking to Michael Isikoff of Yahoo news in September of 2016 in violation of — of rules to do so as an FBI source by talking to the media before the FISA application.”

However, what’s most egregious is that CNN Justice correspondent Evan Perez is even allowed to cover the memo considering his conflicts of interests with Fusion GPS. At any rate, Perez tried to separate the memo from what he considers true criticism of the FBI:

[L]ook, there are some things here that probably will bother Americans about how this was done. But it's different from, you know, saying someone made a mistake from saying they were acting on a partisan point of view or trying to stop Donald Trump or trying to act for partisan purposes which I think is where the FBI really takes offense about what happened here. There may have been mistakes that were made by some people in leadership, but it wasn't necessarily for partisan purposes.

Here’s the relevant transcript from CNN’s Inside Politics on February 2: