Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Tulsi Gabbard on Wednesday declassified and released a September 2020 House Intelligence Committee oversight report detailing how the Obama administration manufactured the fraudulent January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) that claimed Russian President Vladimir Putin and his government helped President Trump win the 2016 election.
According to Gabbard, the new information provides additional evidence that the Obama cabal committed “the most egregious weaponization and politicization of intelligence in American history” with the assistance of a complicit media.
Obama and his team “knowingly lied to the American people,” Gabbard said on a post on X announcing the release of the previously classified report.
The House report was the result of a years-long investigation launched by former House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence Committee (HPSCI) Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), and completed under former HPSCI chairman, now Senator Adam Schiff (D-Calif.).
The ICA is described in the HPSCI report as a “high-profile product ordered by the President [Obama], directed by senior IC agency heads, and created by just five CIA analysts, using one principal drafter.”
“Production of the ICA was subject to unusual directives from the President and senior political appointees, and particularly DCIA,” the report adds. “The draft was not properly coordinated within CIA or the IC, ensuring it would be published without significant challenges to its conclusions.”
Records related to ongoing criminal investigations into Brennan and other Obama intelligence officials reveal that the Intelligence Community had, in fact, strongly objected to Brennan’s political ICA.
According to the Federalist, senior officials had determined there was no evidence to substantiate the claim that Russia meddled in the 2016 election to help Trump win.
“We have no intelligence to directly support this ‘aspiration’ point,” said one member of the small group of individuals working with Brennan, FBI Director James Comey, and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper on the assessment of Russian activity in the lead-up to the 2016 election.
HPSCI found that Brennan’s five hand-picked CIA analysts and drafter “rushed” the ICA assessment “in order to publish two weeks before President-elect Trump was sworn-in.”
“Hurried coordination and limited access to the draft reduced opportunities for the IC to discover misquoting of sources and other tradecraft concerns,” the report states.
The committee also found that the ICA had misrepresented several substandard reports as reliable, instead of acknowledging “their significant underlying flaws.”
“One scant, unclear, and unverifiable fragment of a sentence from one of the substandard reports constitutes the only classified information cited to suggest Putin ‘aspired’ to help Trump win,” the report states, also noting that the ICA “ignored or selectively quoted reliable intelligence reports that challenged-and in some cases undermined—judgments that Putin sought to elect Trump.”
The report states that the ICA “failed to consider plausible alternative explanations of Putin’s intentions indicated by reliable intelligence and observed Russian actions.”
The HPSCI report acknowledges that in 2016, Putin had ordered “conventional cyber influence operations” by “leaking sensitive emails obtained by computer intrusions” in an attempt to “undermine faith in the U.S. democratic process” and to weaken what they viewed as Hillary Clinton’s “inevitable” presidency.
According to the report, President Barack Obama, former Director of the CIA John Brennan, and other regime spooks suppressed the intelligence showing Putin was actually expecting Clinton to win the 2016 election, and instead manufactured findings that he preferred Trump using “shoddy sources” that violated Intelligence Community (IC) standards.
Brennan testified under oath before the House Intelligence Committee on May 23, 2017 that the Steele dossier “wasn’t part of the corpus of intelligence information that we had. It was not in any way used as a basis for the Intelligence Community Assessment that was done.”
But as American Greatness has previously reported, Obama’s CIA director actually insisted on the inclusion of the discredited Steele dossier, over the strong objections of the CIA’s two most senior Russia experts, who said it “did not meet even the most basic tradecraft standards.”
“Not only did CIA Director Brennan, FBI Director Comey, DNI Clapper and others include the Steele Dossier in the 2017 ICA, they overruled senior Intel officials who warned them it was fabricated and should not be used,” Gabbard posted on X.
A two-page summary of the discredited “dodgy dossier” was included in an appendix of the classified version of the ICA. The fabricated dossier was also used to justify the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane investigation.
While the Obama administration had claimed the final product was independently produced with “apolitical analysis,” Gabbard argued the opposite was true.
“Obama ordered the Intelligence Community to create an Intelligence Community Assessment they knew was false, promoting a contrived narrative, with the intent of undermining the legitimacy and power of a duly elected President of the United States, Donald Trump,” the DNI wrote on X.
Gabbard concluded that the Obama regime “conspired to subvert the will of the American people” by “enacting a years-long coup” against the duly elected president.