Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Tulsi Gabbard revealed the shaky and outright fabricated intelligence undergirding claims Russia aspired to elect President Donald Trump in a report with few redactions over the objections of bureaucrats at multiple intelligence agencies, according to a Washington Post report.
The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and other agencies reportedly invoked concerns about the exposure of “sources and methods,” the paper reported, citing anonymous people “familiar with the matter.” Two former CIA officials who concluded in 2017 that Russia aided Trump told the paper they stood by their assessment.
Gabbard has accused former President Barack Obama and his then-intelligence chiefs — CIA Director John Brennan, DNI James Clapper and FBI Director James Comey — of a conspiracy to undermine Trump and disregard the will of the American people in the 2016 election.
The 46-page report, dated September 2020, was based on 2,300 hours of investigation and 20 interviews in a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility at CIA headquarters. CIA higher-ups would not permit the report to be transported from CIA grounds until recent weeks when CIA Director John Ratcliffe and Trump intervened, the Post reported.
The report, a House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) investigation, exposed in stark detail that substandard raw intelligence reports had been distorted, improperly resurrected or wholly manufactured in order to support a narrative that Russian President Vladimir Putin aspired to help Trump by sabotaging rival Hillary Clinton. A “high confidence” judgement that Putin aspired to elect Trump rested on fragment of a sentence that five analysts read five different ways, the report said.
But the congressional report points the finger particularly at the former CIA chief as having personally interfered in the creation of a 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) by handpicking the authors and verbally briefing unpublished intelligence in an apparent push to reach a desired conclusion.
Three weeks before the release of the congressional investigation, the CIA released a self-assessment of its own “tradecraft” by the deputy director of CIA for analysis, who is unnamed in the report. While it concluded that CIA analysts were subject to “procedural anomalies” and Brennan’s outsized influence, the report also claimed the ICA had “analytic rigor” which “exceeded that of most IC assessments.”
HPSCI Chair Rick Crawford proclaimed the report a “whitewash” within hours of its release, prompting Ratcliffe to personally move to declassify the more strident report.
The Justice Department has opened an investigation into Obama officials for an alleged criminal conspiracy through a designated “strike force” and Attorney General Pam Bondi has ordered a grand jury to potentially hear evidence in the case.
The Post quotes Sen. Mark R. Warner of Virginia, the Senate Intelligence Committee’s ranking Democrat, describing the release as “desperate and irresponsible.”
“The release of the partisan House Intelligence report puts at risk some of the most sensitive sources and methods our Intelligence Community uses to spy on Russia and keep Americans safe,” he said.
The Post does not mention however that the flurry of declassifications in recent days included documents obtained from an anonymous deputy national intelligence officer (DNIO) at the National Intelligence Council (NIC), whose sign off would have helped facilitate the endorsement of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) of the ICA. The whistleblower told Gabbard that he had felt pressure from his superiors but that the evidence was weak.
The DIA ultimately did not sign off on the ICA. The whistleblower said that he had attempted to alert his senator, Warner, but never received an email to contact from his staff.
Questions remain about whether the revelations will shake up the ranks of unnamed officials at CIA and other agencies.
Gabbard has said that while the most recognizable principals in the Russiagate affair have left the intelligence community, the culture fostered by Brennan and Clapper endures.
“When you talk about how do we change this, you have to recognize that both of them, John Brennan and James Clapper, as leaders in the intelligence community, they have their own disciples,” Gabbard said in a Tuesday interview with the New York Post. “They have a lot of their own people that they brought in with them or that they mentored in a mirroring of their own image.”
Brennan’s influence on the CIA extends through a network of analysts in his mold he cultivated over the years, experts told the DCNF. At least two analysts directly involved with the production of the 2017 ICA retain influence at CIA as employees or contractors.
The newspaper itself has also come under scrutiny in the wake of the recent declassifications. The Post shared a 2018 National Reporting Pulitzer Prize with the New York Times for reporting on alleged ties between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin. The veracity of that reporting is at the center of an ongoing libel lawsuit brought by Trump against the board of the prizes.
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