Senior intelligence community officials suppressed evidence contradicting the finding that Vladimir Putin wanted Donald Trump to defeat Hillary Clinton in 2016, according to a long-buried congressional probe Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard declassified Wednesday.
The 46-page report had for years been locked away at Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) headquarters, with the intelligence community not permitting it to be transported to Capitol Hill until recent weeks. The House Intelligence Committee spent 2,300 hours reviewing the underlying intelligence and interviewed 20 individuals. The declassified report was first published by Fox News.
“The judgement that Putin developed a ‘clear preference for candidate Trump and ‘aspired to help his chances of victory’ did not adhere to the tenets of the ICD (Intelligence Community Directive) analytical standards,” the report reads.
Reliable intelligence challenged and undermined the premise of a January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) directed by President Barack Obama concluding Russia had conspired to undermine Clinton’s chances.
The newly declassified report puts a spotlight particularly on John Brennan, Obama’s CIA director.
Brennan “ordered the post-election publication of 15 reports containing previously collected but unpublished intelligence, three of which were substandard – containing information that was unclear, of uncertain origin, potentially biased or implausible – and those became foundational sources for the ICA judgements that Putin preferred Trump over Clinton,” the report reads.
One “scant, unclear, and unverifiable fragment of a sentence from one of these substandard reports constitutes the only classified information cited to suggest Putin ‘aspired’ to help Trump win,” it states.
That revelation calls into question the text of the ICA, which states that the CIA and the FBI assessed with “high confidence” that Russia aspired to help Trump win.
Brennan could not be reached for comment.
Gabbard declassified documents on July 18 showing that Obama tasked the intelligence community with uncovering evidence of Russian meddling in a Dec. 9, 2016, meeting with his top national security officials in the White House Situation Room, with the aim of making a version public for the press. The meeting came just one day after the FBI under Director James Comey scuttled a Presidential Daily Brief that concluded the opposite.
The details, including information Gabbard has described as “blatantly false,” soon leaked to the Washington Post and the New York Times. Trump being briefed on the ICA was the news peg that many journalists used to launch a years-long media frenzy that included extensive discussion of the Steele dossier, a discredited and salacious opposition research document funded by the Clinton campaign, and that had been largely dismissed by reporters prior to that, according to a Columbia Journalism Review investigation.
The congressional report is more strident in its criticism of the intelligence community than a self-assessment released in June by CIA Director John Ratcliffe.
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Rick Crawford of Arkansas had accused that assessment of being a “whitewash” and called for his committee’s investigation to be released from its CIA lockbox.
The FBI is reportedly investigating Obama intelligence officials Comey and Brennan under potential conspiracy charges related to politicized intelligence. Gabbard has also referred documents to the Department of Justice pertaining to Obama’s actions.
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