The new reports and documents being fed to Public and Racket have added a new layer of scandal to the Russian collusion hoax. We knew this was a political hack job. It’s now veered into territory where people should be indicted for illegal spy operations. It also should spur Republicans to haul James Comey, Gina Haspel, and John Brennan back onto the Hill to answer questions about this intelligence scandal for which no one has honestly been held accountable. The latest development centers on the 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment and the severe narrative problem it encountered upon its creation.
Behind the scenes, there was disagreement and a lack of consensus on the conclusion that then-CIA Director John Brennan wanted to be factual—that Russia wanted Trump to win. Still, the media ran with it, further fanning the flames of the fake Kremlin interference hoax during the 2016 election. The intelligence community wanted to get Trump, but there was a problem: the Kremlin wanted Hillary Clinton to win, viewing her presidency as more manageable. They weren’t afraid of her. Here was when Brennan reportedly decided to handpick his analysts to compartmentalize selective intelligence to back his Trump-Russia bias, thereby cooking the intelligence and ironically doing the work of the Main Directorate of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation (GRU) in marginalizing the work of the State Department and the Defense Intelligence Agency who did not support the CIA’s main Russia conclusion:
BOMBSHELL: a new report says Russia didn't want Trump to win in 2016, they wanted Hillary and the CIA knew it. Obama's CIA director, John Brennan, manufactured evidence for the Russia hoax, according to @shellenberger and @mtaibbi pic.twitter.com/u8aMMvqsTb
— Jesse Watters (@JesseBWatters) February 16, 2024
The Trump-Russia scandal made its formal launch on January 6th, 2017, when the office of the Director of National Intelligence James Clapper published what’s called an “Intelligence Community Assessment,” or “ICA,” as it’s universally known in Washington.
Release of the ICA dominated headlines, fixed Donald Trump in the minds of millions of Americans as a Manchurian candidate controlled by Vladamir Putin, and upended his in-coming administration.
The report declared that Russia and Putin interfered in the 2016 presidential election to “denigrate” Hillary Clinton and “harm her electability,” thanks to their “clear preference for President-elect [Donald] Trump.”
It was powerful stuff. And it was dead wrong.
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Former CIA Director John Brennan and the ICA authors “embellished” their conclusion by upgrading unreliable sources to reliable, the source said. “They upgraded in the writing of their report to let those sources have more credibility and a higher rating. We caught them on 3-4 items where those people didn’t have a credible historic reporting line and changed the source rating for that Brennan report.”
Dissent, even within Brennan’s group of 24 “hand-picked” analysts — not from 17 agencies but just four, and really just three, when one considers the ODNI is just a coordinating agency — was overruled.
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None of the information shared with Public and Racket has been reported until now.
Public noted that the ICA is a new report within the IC, resting between the National Intelligence Estimate, which offers a three-to-five-year projection of certain security trends. In contrast, the Special National Intelligence Assessment, or SNIE, provides a one-to-two-year outlook. The shortest intelligence report is the ‘community brief,’ which rose from the ashes of the 9/11 terror attacks. Michael Shellenberger, Matt Taibbi, and Alex Gutentag added that the ICA rests between the SNIE and ICB. They also noted that the report, which was 20-30 pages in length, did not include the multiple disagreements among those within the IC about the CIA’s conclusion about Russia’s activities during the 2016 election. The State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence Research, the NSA director, two top CIA officials for Russian operations, and the Defense Intelligence Agency all got overruled by Brennan:
Multiple sources said Brennan’s exclusion of the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence Research (INR) were and are red flags pointing to a manipulated conclusion.
“The real story is that Brennan and Clapper succeeded in marginalizing both the State Department and the DIA, which has primary responsibility for the GRU,” says former CIA official Ray McGovern.
Former Russian ambassador to Moscow Jack Matlock in 2018 described being told by a “Senior official” that “the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence Research did, in fact, have a different opinion but was not allowed to express it.”
“State and defense are the two big players,” agrees another former diplomat with a connection to the case. The CIA in recent times has occasionally kept State out of the loop out of concerns about leaks, but to keep out the DIA was “crazy,” the source said.
The problem with trying to manufacture a big lie for political gain is that once it gets out with the CIA seal on it, the scope of the mess could reach biblical proportions:
A bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee investigation also reviewed the ICA in a 158-page report released in 2020 and pronounced it a “sound intelligence product.”
However, there’s significant independent verification of the idea that the “Russia favored Trump” conclusion was indeed “cooked.” Former Director Brennan’s own book, Undaunted, describes how he not only overruled NSA director Mike Rogers but “two senior managers for the CIA mission center for Russia,” whom he decided had “not read all the available intelligence.”
It’s well-known that the NSA and Rogers never moved off their conclusion that there was not “sufficient evidence to support a high-confidence judgment that Russia supported Trump,” as Brennan put it. They expressed only “moderate” confidence in the idea.
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In the first week in December, the CIA and FBI each gave secret briefings to the Senate. These presentations appeared to conflict so much on the question of whether or not the interference was to help Trump that the differing accounts were leaked to the Washington Post, which quickly published “FBI and CIA Give Differing Accounts on Russia’s Motives.”
A week later, on December 16th, 2016, the Post published a different story, called “FBI in agreement with CIA that Russia aimed to help Trump,” announcing the FBI change of mind. Unnamed officials surfaced to explain that lawmakers who felt the FBI and CIA had differing accounts “misunderstood,” telling the paper, “The truth is they were never all that different in the first place.”
When Comey testified in the House and revealed the existence of an investigation into Trump in a blockbuster televised proceeding in March, 2020, he made a point of fixing the date of the FBI’s certainty about Russia’s motives in December, 2016, i.e. after the election.
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Sources believe Brennan relied a great deal on one human asset, allegedly in Russia, who allegedly had access to the very desk of Vladimir Putin and was publicly described as “instrumental” to the CIA’s judgment on Russia’s motives.
This “highest level source for the US inside the Kremlin” was deemed so important that a high-level operation was apparently executed to “exfiltrate” him from Russia, reportedly – the story was leaked to CNN, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and others – out of fears for his life. The official was later identified by the Russian newspaper Kommersant as a mid-level diplomat named Oleg Smolenkov and was so frightened for his safety he bought a house under his own name in Stafford, Virginia, the news reaching the world via Realtor.com.
Unsurprisingly, there were deep internal disagreements, though when these reports were released, we didn’t know the extent of Brennan’s alleged meddling. We also didn’t know until this week that the US intelligence community began their illegal spy operation into Trump well before the FBI’s July 2016 date, which has been viewed as the start of this operation into alleged Trump-Kremlin ties, which have since been debunked. The foreign intelligence agencies of our allies, the Five Eyes, were roped into assisting these deep state actors in their unholy crusade to take down an American citizen.
The CIA had to sign off on this operation, which is where Trump CIA Director Gina Haspel comes into play; as station chief in London, she signed off on this probe. The FBI can’t peek around overseas with the IC’s blessing, so that explains why she and the rest of the IC fought like hell to block any further Russian documents from being declassified in the twilight of the Trump presidency.
There’s a binder that airs all the missing dirty laundry, though suspicions that it was located at Mar-a-Lago might have been the reason behind the FBI’s raid in August of 2022.
There needs to be a deeper dive, especially with congressional investigators revisiting these allegations, but that might take a long time due to the impending presidential election. Republicans also need healthy congressional majorities to pull this off. As we saw with the Mayorkas impeachment, slim majorities could end with sloppy execution, which we cannot afford to have here.