Drip, Drip, Drip

The (should've been) bombshell report that Russia has been offering bounties on coalition forces in Afghanistan is not going to go away, I hope.

The timeline is instructive. The report first surfaced in newspapers and got a somewhat muted response from Trump's media flack. Basically, the excuse was "Trump and Pence were not briefed on this."  This led to howls of protest from those associated with the intelligence community. There current spin is that these reports are considered false.  Here's the spin:

White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said during a television appearance Monday morning on Fox News that lawmakers would be briefed on the situation later in the day, adding, “I think that will clear up a lot of the false reporting.”
...
McEnany said media reports have been based on “alleged intelligence that was never briefed to the president of the United States,” and she criticized the media for “spewing out” false information.

McEnany said that as a matter of practice, Trump is briefed only on intelligence that is found to be “verifiable and credible.”

So the White House's first response was "Trump was never briefed." That was met with a resounding "WHY THE FUCK NOT?" The White House is now shifting to "These reports are exaggerated and inaccurate." (There is another option, which is that the intelligence was given to Trump in writing, but since he doesn't read and has the attention span of a fruit fly and the curiosity of a banana slug he never read, thus he was "never briefed." Jon Chait explores it here.)

The problem with saying that the intelligence isn't reliable or was exaggerated is that the Times, the Post and several other outlets all confirmed the story. Now we get this bombshell, right on cue. There is good evidence that Coalition forces were killed due to these bounties.

The CIA is not immune to being wrong, but they do keep their receipts. And they have some experience toppling regimes. They know what they are doing.

Basically, they are going to give McEnany and Trump enough rope to hang themselves.  They will get them to commit to a lie and then expose the lie as such.

Drip, drip, drip.