CNN national security correspondent David Ensor just threw a large bucket of cold water on the Washington Post’s front-page insinuations that the president lied about the Iraqi trailers found after the invasion. As he explained to Situation Room guest host Heidi Collins, it is highly unlikely that Bush ever saw the report on which the WaPo story is based:

ENSOR: Something like this is a field report, Heidi, done by a group of people that were actually not government employees, but they’d been asked by CIA and others, the Pentagon, to go look at these labs, so this kind of a report is a raw field report. It would not have gone to the president’s desk. He’s not an intelligence officer. He’s a consumer of intelligence. It would go to the CIA or to the appropriate place in the government where they would analyze it, compare it with other intelligence they had, and only when they were satisfied that they could draw some kind of meaningful conclusion… they would then pass that on to policymakers, possibly including the president.
So it’s really not fair, in a way, to accuse him of saying the wrong thing in this particular case. I mean after all, in October of that year — many months later — David Kay, who was assigned by the CIA to look at these weapons, was still saying they could be bioweapons labs. February, the following year, George Tenet, the then-still director of central intelligence, was saying in a speech that he wasn’t sure. So to blame the president for saying it back in May, may not be fair.

Of course, it’s still possible that Bush was told about this dissenting report. But one of the many weaknesses of the Washington Post article is that it doesn’t bother to provide us with the answer to that question.

Video here.