In June 2017, well on their way to a Pulitzer for national reporting, the stenographers at the Washington Post published a lengthy, breathless article about an extraordinary message delivered to the White House in early August 2016.
According to the Post, CIA Director John Brennan had sent an “intelligence bombshell” directly to President Barack Obama, an “eyes only” report. So sensitive was the report that Brennan kept it out of the President’s Daily Brief and insisted it “be returned immediately after it was read.”
The report was allegedly “drawn from sourcing deep inside the Russian government.” It detailed not only Vladimir Putin’s “direct involvement in a cyber campaign to disrupt and discredit the U.S. presidential race,” but also “Putin’s specific instructions on the operation’s audacious objectives — defeat or at least damage the Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton, and help elect her opponent, Donald Trump.”
In early August 2016, the Post reported, “the outlines of the Russian assault on the U.S. election were increasingly apparent.” Except that they weren’t. This was the rare bombshell that had no fallout. As documented by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard on July 18, 2025, the outlines of the “assault” were not apparent to the members of the intelligence community and would not be even when coerced to sign on months later.
On Aug. 31, 2016, a DHS official told former DNI James Clapper that there was “no indication of a Russian threat to directly manipulate the actual vote count.” On Sept. 2, 2016, the FBI asked that an upcoming intelligence community assessment be “softened,” given that it was “uncomfortable” implying that there was “definitive information that Russia does intend to disrupt our elections.”
On Sept. 9, 2016, an Office of the Director of National Intelligence official said that an upcoming President’s Daily Briefing should make clear that Russia “probably is not trying … to influence the election by using cyber means” to target election infrastructure. The lead author on the President’s Daily Briefing agreed.
On Sept. 12, the intelligence community published an assessment stating that “foreign adversaries do not have and will probably not obtain the capabilities to successfully execute widespread and undetected cyber attacks” on election infrastructure.
In their Oct. 7, 2016, press release, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Department of Homeland Security omitted the fact that the FBI and NSA had “low confidence” in attributing the data leaks from the DNC to Russia. The fact that its agents were denied access to the Democratic National Committee servers may explain why the FBI had so little confidence.
Even Shawn Henry, president of the Democrat-friendly CrowdStrike, the outfit that reviewed the DNC servers, had doubts about Russian culpability. In closed-door testimony before the House Intelligence Community in December 2017, Henry conceded, “There’s not evidence that [the data] were actually exfiltrated. There’s circumstantial evidence but no evidence that they were actually exfiltrated.”
In what now reads like a punch line to a bad joke, the Post reported in June 2017, “It took time for other parts of the intelligence community to endorse the CIA’s view.” The Post failed to mention that many of the “other parts” were steamrollered into endorsing the CIA position. Concluded the Post, “Only in the administration’s final weeks in office did it tell the public, in a declassified report, what officials had learned from Brennan in August — that Putin was working to elect Trump.”
The Post was referring here to the now notorious intelligence community assessment of Jan. 6, 2017. Titled “Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections,” the assessment concluded that Putin “ordered” an influence campaign, the goal of which was “to undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency,” a conclusion Brennan allegedly reached in early August 2016.
What is shocking, appalling really, is that as late as June 2017, the Post had no idea that the Hillary Clinton campaign had commissioned the Steele dossier, the foundational piece of the intelligence community assessment. If the Post editors did not know the provenance of the Steele dossier, Brennan did.
In September 2020, the Senate Judiciary Committee shared documents declassified by Trump’s director of national intelligence, John Ratcliffe. They read in part, “According to his handwritten notes,” Brennan “briefed President Obama and other senior national security officials on the intelligence, including the ‘alleged approval by Hillary Clinton on July 26, 2016 of a proposal from one of her foreign policy advisors to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by Russian security services.’”
Thanks to the release of the Durham annex, we now know that the foreign policy adviser Brennan referenced was veteran globalist Julianne Smith. On July 25, 2016, Soros’ guy in the Clinton campaign, Leonard Benardo, wrote in an email, “Julie says it will be a long-term affair to demonize Putin and Trump. Now it is good for a post-convention bounce. Later the FBI will put more oil into the fire.”
On July 27, Benardo wrote in a follow-up email, “HRC approved Julia’s idea about Trump and Russia hampering U.S. elections. This should distract people from her own missing email, especially if the affair goes to the Olympic level.” Four days later, July 31, the FBI poured oil on the fire, opening its “Crossfire Hurricane” investigation into Trump–Russia collusion.
The Hillary Clinton plot to “demonize Trump and Putin” seems to have paid off in spades. In early August 2016, within a week or so of the plot’s conception, Brennan — in the Post’s June 2017 retelling — presented Obama with the Russian plan to help elect Donald Trump, not as a figment of Hillary’s twisted imagination, but as a genuine threat to the 2016 election.
A month after Trump’s surprise victory, at a meeting of national security officials on Dec. 9, 2016, Brennan’s bombshell took on new life. “After the meeting,” the Gabbard document reads, “in an email titled ‘POTUS Tasking on Russia Election Meddling,’ Director of National Intelligence James Clapper’s assistant sends an email to ODNI leaders tasking them with the creation of an ‘assessment per the President’s request.’ ODNI leads the effort, along with CIA, FBI, NSA, and DHS.”
Thanks to the faithful propagandists at the Washington Post, we know that the assessment that these intelligence honchos had been tasked with creating had already been created. On the very same day that the meeting was held, Dec. 9, the Washington Post headlined an article about that meeting “Secret CIA assessment says Russia was trying to help Trump win White House.”
The leak, likely from Brennan or a cut-out, inspired this definitive opening Post paragraph: “The CIA has concluded in a secret assessment that Russia intervened in the 2016 election to help Donald Trump win the presidency, rather than just to undermine confidence in the U.S. electoral system, according to officials briefed on the matter.”
To recap, Brennan learned in late July that Hillary’s people had concocted a plan to demonize Trump by linking him to Putin. At about that same time, according to his own handwritten notes, Brennan briefed Obama on Hillary’s plot. Within a week or so, according to the Post, Brennan sent Obama a bombshell report insisting the Russian plot was real. For three months, no one took the plot seriously until December 2016, when Obama and his co-conspirators went into overdrive to hang this plot on Trump and Putin.
What’s curious about Brennan’s “intelligence bombshell” was that it left no paper trail, no way for future investigators to confirm or deny its existence. If this were Brennan’s plan, he appears to have succeeded. In reading through the various documents released by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard in the last few weeks, I have seen no reference to the existence of this hush-hush document.
As to Brennan’s motives, I speculate, but this new revelation helped keep the Russia–Trump plot in the news, which would prove useful in delivering the House to the Democrats in 2018 and shutting down Devin Nunes’ irksome committee.
It also provided the intelligence community retelling of the Trump–Russia story with an origin story, not in Hillary Clinton’s schemes but in Vladimir Putin’s. Finally, the story burnished Brennan’s star. He wasn’t about to cede the glory of subverting Trump to the newly martyred James Comey and his clumsy “Crossfire Hurricane” investigation. No, Brennan had resources of his own. This was his baby.
Pride, as they say, goes before the fall. Here’s hoping they are right.
Jack Cashill is the author of Unmasking Obama, among other books.
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