It’s like the game six degrees of Kevin Bacon, where people challenge each other to find the shortest connection between actors linked in film roles to a film with Kevin Bacon.
Except the Associated Press does it with “sources” and the challenge is to connect them to Donald Trump and Russia. It all led up to a story with this opening paragraph on Friday:
A senior Justice Department lawyer says a former British spy told him at a breakfast meeting two years ago that Russian intelligence believed it had Donald Trump “over a barrel,” according to multiple people familiar with the encounter.
Wow.
The AP reports that the lawyer, Bruce Ohr, had breakfast with Trump/Russia dossier author Christopher Steele two years ago. Anonymous sources familiar with the breakfast meeting claim Ohr’s testimony to lawmakers “reveal an exchange of potentially explosive information about Trump between two men the president has relentlessly sought to discredit.”
CNN loves six degrees of separation too. Here’s their opening paragraph on the story:
A Justice Department lawyer whose ties to the infamous dossier about President Donald Trump and Russia has drawn the ire of Republicans told House lawmakers that he was told Russian intelligence thought they had the then-candidate "over a barrel" during the 2016 campaign, a source with knowledge of the testimony told CNN.
Many other outlets, including the Washington Times, used the information and attributed it to the AP.
On a somewhat related note, Donald Trump was in the 1998 movie Celebrity with Sam Rockwell, who appeared in the film Frost/Nixon with Kevin Bacon.
At the time of publication it is not known if Bacon has any potentially explosive information on the breakfast meeting between Ohr and Steele that happened two years ago.