The DOJ announced that it is forming a "strike force" to investigate and potentially prosecute Obama and his co-conspirators in the anti-Trump Putsch:
GRAHAM, CORNYN CALL FOR SPECIAL PROSECUTOR: Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and John Cornyn (R-Texas) are jointly calling for Attorney General Pam Bondi to appoint a Special Prosecutor to assess evidence former President Barack Obama managed the Russia-gate effort to undermine Donald Trump during his first term in the Oval Office.
-- Mark Tapscott at Instapundit
UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Special prosecutors don't seem that good at getting to the bottom of things.
Yeah, he's right, special prosecutors seem to mostly pursue political ends, and the end here is to bury the story, because it's too big. Once you give a matter to a special prosecutor, his office is a black box from which no information flows until, one day, many years from now, he emerges from his office to declare "No intent."
The Obama intelligence community's claim that Russian President Vladimir Putin authorized dirty tricks to try and help Donald Trump win the 2016 election was based on "one scant, unclear and unverifiable fragment of a sentence from one of the substandard [intelligence] reports," according to a just-declassified report that had been locked away in a CIA vault.
Nevertheless, former CIA Director John Brennan ordered agency analysts to use the claim in the Intelligence Community Assessment issued during the Obama administration's final days -- even though the ICA itself noted that how the information on Putin's plans was obtained was "not explicitly clear."
A 46-page report by the House of Representatives released Wednesday found that the source of the claim about Putin -- reportedly a Russian defector living in Northern Virginia described as "anti-Trump" -- merely speculated to Brennan about something he had been told by somebody else: namely, that Putin was "counting on" Trump winning.
I thought this was Iggy Danchenko, the permanent floating employee of various Democrat grifter operations who wanted a position in the would-be Hillary Clinton administration. But Sperry thinks it's someone else.
ICA participants interpreted the informant's phrase "counting on" several different ways, the report said. Many NSA and CIA officials viewed "counting on" as meaning the same thing as "expected," which is much different than the language -- Putin "preferred" Trump -- Brennan's five handpicked drafters used in the ICA.
The congressional review determined that "the ICA did not cite any [classified] report where Putin directly indicated helping Trump win was the objective." (Emphasis added.)
No Corroborating Intelligence
The report then drops a bombshell: "The ICA judgment on Putin's thoughts about helping candidate Trump does not stand if [Brennan's] single interpretation of the fragment [from the tip that Putin was 'counting on' Trump winning] is wrong, because there is no other intelligence corroborating it."
The 2019 report, which investigated the spycraft that went into the highly classified and restricted version of the ICA, found that the Obama intelligence community's assessment of Russia's intentions changed sharply after Trump's surprising victory.
On the eve of the 2016 election, Brennan sent a "Fusion Cell" memo to Obama summarizing all the most secret, compartmented intel gathered on Trump and Russia. According to the House report declassified and released by DNI Tulsi Gabbard on Wednesday, that memo " made no mention of Putin 'aspiring' for a Trump victory." Although the Russian defector had shared his thoughts about Putin with Brennan in July, the CIA director's Nov. 6 memo concluded, "Putin expected [Clinton] to win."
But then in early December, after Obama ordered a new assessment, Brennan dusted off the informant's second-hand hearsay, which had been shelved as unreliable. The CIA director, who had previously worked for Obama in the White House, suddenly insisted it underpin the new conclusion about Putin's motives.
"The major 'high confidence' judgment of the ICA rests on one opinion about a text fragment with uncertain meaning," the House report found. "This text -- which would not have been published without [Brennan's] orders to do so -- is cited using only one interpretation of its meaning and without considering alternative interpretations," in violation of Intelligence Community Directive 203. One alternative was that Putin was "counting on" Trump winning the primary and nomination at the GOP Convention that July, just two weeks after the informant provided the tip, not the general election in November 2106.
...
Brennan, who could not be reached for comment, has strongly defended his work. Requests for comment from Comey and his attorney went unanswered.
Harvey and other investigators spent hundreds of hours inside a highly secure room called a SCIF at CIA headquarters poring over the raw intelligence materials that supposedly backstopped the ICA's conclusions. In an exclusive interview with RealClearInvestigations, he said it became clear, after closer inspection, that the raw information the informant provided lacked credibility. "There really was no evidence that Putin supported Trump," Harvey said.
Even so, Brennan as well as Comey, who also handled the informant, pushed to include his tip in the ICA to back the judgment Putin worked to help Trump win the election, all the while concealing their star source's identity, background and reliability from most of the participants involved in the crafting of the ICA.
"They knew he was not reliable and they tried to hide access to him," Harvey said. "They knew he had bad sources. This stuff was weak."
...
Brennan's informant is believed to be Oleg Smolenkov, who previously worked in the Russian Embassy in Washington and later as a government foreign policy adviser in Moscow, before moving back to the D.C. area in early 2017.
Brennan said his source could not be revealed because Putin might have him executed. However, reporters easily found Smolenkov living in a six-bedroom home in Stafford, Va., listed in his and his wife's real names.
It's not known if Smolenkov was paid for his information. The CIA and FBI declined to comment.
...
Explaining why NSA dissented from the key Putin conclusion, former NSA Director Adm. Mike Rogers argued the human source it was based on "did not have direct access" to insider information about Putin. Also, he added, "I didn't see multiple sources."
Foreign press outlets have noted that Smolenkov "would not have direct access to secret information at either the Russian Embassy in the U.S. or while working for the presidential administration in Moscow."
Mollie Hemingway has a fresh report about all of the professional, career intelligence analysts -- the ones we're supposed to always trust above political appointees like John Brennan -- who objected to Brennan's dirty oppo file cocaine and did not believe it could be cooked into pure, healthy Natural Crack.
Senior intelligence officials strenuously fought the demands of former FBI Director James Comey and other Obama intelligence chiefs to include the false and unverified Steele dossier in an official assessment of Russian activities ordered by President Barack Obama in the closing weeks of his presidency, records reviewed exclusively by The Federalist show. The records, which are related to ongoing criminal investigations into Comey and other top intelligence officials for their roles in launching the Russia collusion hoax, provide damning evidence of Obama intelligence chiefs' malfeasance beyond the explosive information released Wednesday by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard.
Previous government investigations into the Russia collusion hoax dryly described the opposition merely as officials having "expressed concern" about using the infamous Steele dossier because it was "not completely vetted." But records reviewed by The Federalist reveal career intelligence officials expressed outright shock at the poor quality of the reporting that the FBI repeatedly insisted be included in the Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) -- and objected to any reference to the dodgy dossier.
"Based solely on what we DO know now, my bottom line is this -- unless FBI is prepared to provide much better sourcing -- I believe this should NOT be included in the paper," one official wrote, caps and all. Noting that the document had not been formally issued as an FBI product, the official stressed it suffered from "POOR SOURCE TRADECRAFT," had "extremely sketchy" sourcing, and "simply does not meet normal [intelligence community] standards."
The Steele dossier, a product of the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign, was a collection of salacious and unverified stories about rival presidential candidate Donald Trump supposedly colluding with Russia. Clinton secretly funded the information operation and the group she hired to create the dossier spread the false information it contained to reporters, politicians, and the FBI.
...
Former FBI Director James Comey's demand the ICA include the Steele dossier helped Brennan develop the false but explosive narrative that Russia interfered in the 2016 election in order to help Trump. Intelligence officials immediately pushed back on including the dossier in the ICA, with one senior official recorded as saying, in materials reviewed exclusively by The Federalist, that the fact that the source was paid at first by an "anti-Trump Republican, and later a different Democrat client" meant the author knew what his clients wanted. He "clearly had a motive to pass along info, however poorly sourced, since it generated revenue," the official warned.
Intelligence officials also worried that Steele had relied on sub-sources whose identity and credibility were unknown to the FBI. The concern was validated in January 2017 when interviews with the primary subsource, Igor Danchenko, showed the document's scurrilous allegations lacked credibility. Rather than admit their error, FBI officials continued to defend their use of the dossier for years and hid Danchenko's identity from congressional scrutiny by hiring him as an informant.
FBI officials insisted to the officials working on the ICA that the information in the dossier was good. One intelligence official wondered why, if the information was as good as the FBI claimed, Democrats did not deploy it against Trump during the campaign, the records stated.
The FBI countered that Steele was a credible source whose reporting had, at least somewhat, been corroborated. The intelligence officials were skeptical.
"If, as we have been told, FBI has some corroborating material from an ongoing investigation, can that be used? I thought they never do that? If they feel this overrides the investigation, some of the corroborating reporting must be included in the paper. If not, I would argue for dropping the page," the official said, explaining in detail "Why we should oppose inclusion of the FBI material."
The previously unreported records reviewed by The Federalist also showed the FBI stressing that since the Steele dossier was already "out there," it should be included in the body of the ICA.
A senior intelligence official eviscerated the argument, responding: "Just how 'out there' is it? All we know for sure is that much of the content of the document appeared in [Mother Jones] in October and a copy of something is in Sen. McCain's hands." The senior official added that including the dossier in the ICA would essentially confirm the salacious reporting, punctuating his point by comparing the Steele reporting to a December 12, 2016 National Enquirer story headlined, "MUSLIM SPIES IN OBAMA'S CIA!" That article included quotes from sources alleging that the agency had 55 double agents, so the analyst asked rhetorically if that detail should be included in an intelligence assessment as well.
CNN's racist witch-faced left-wing "national security" (and social justice) "analyst" explained that Clapper is just sad to see that Muh Pillars of Muh Republic is crumbling.
Juliette Kayyem
@juliettekayyem
Knowing Clapper, I think that is the sound of a man distraught that a nation he spent his life defending as an intelligence chief now has one who is using the position to defame people Trump doesn't like in order to deflect from his scandals. That's the sound.