Jake Tapper is writing Original Sin 2: CIA Boogaloo.
A bombshell new CIA review of the Obama administration's spy agencies' assessment that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election to help Donald Trump was deliberately corrupted by then-CIA Director John Brennan, FBI Director James Comey and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, who were "excessively involved" in its drafting, and rushed its completion in a "chaotic," "atypical" and "markedly unconventional" process that raised questions of a "potential political motive."
Further, Brennan's decision to include the discredited Steele dossier, over the objections of the CIA's most senior Russia experts, "undermined the credibility" of the assessment.
The "Tradecraft Review of the 2016 Intelligence Community Assessment [ICA] on Russian Election Interference" was conducted by career professionals at the CIA's Directorate of Analysis and was commissioned by CIA Director John Ratcliffe in May.
The "lessons-learned review" found that, on December 6, 2016, six weeks before his presidency ended, Barack Obama ordered the assessment, which concluded that Russian President Vladimir Putin "aspired" to help Trump win the election.
The review identified "multiple procedural anomalies" that undermined the credibility of the ICA, including "a highly compressed production timeline, stringent compartmentation, and excessive involvement of agency heads."
It also questioned the exclusion of key intelligence agencies and said media leaks may have influenced analysts to conform to a false narrative of Trump-Russia collusion.
"The rushed timeline to publish both classified and unclassified versions before the presidential transition raised questions about a potential political motive behind the White House tasking and timeline."
The review found that Brennan directed the compilation of the ICA, and that his, Comey's and Clapper's "direct engagement in the ICA's development was highly unusual in both scope and intensity" and "risked stifling analytic debate."
Brennan handpicked the CIA analysts to compile the ICA and involved only the ODNI, CIA, FBI and NSA, excluding 13 of the then-17 intelligence agencies.
He sidelined the National Intelligence Council and forced the inclusion of the discredited Steele dossier despite objections of the authors and senior CIA Russia experts, so as to push a false narrative that Russia secured Trump's 2016 victory.
"This was Obama, Comey, Clapper and Brennan deciding 'We're going to screw Trump,'" said Ratcliffe in an exclusive interview.
"It was, 'We're going to create this and put the imprimatur of an IC assessment in a way that nobody can question it.' They stamped it as Russian collusion and then classified it so nobody could see it.
Here's what the evidence showed happened here. If any of the co-conspirators want to correct this and tell us how the paperclipped dossier made it to CNN airwaves in mere days, please contact me and I'll correct.
But this is what the evidence shows:
Comey and Brennan were trying to get the press to report on the "dossier." But even CNN wouldn't report on it, because nothing in it was verified. Comey himself said -- I think in a 60 Minutes interview -- that CNN told him they couldn't report it without a "news hook."
What's a news hook? It's a dishonest pretext for publishing false information that you want to smear someone with. For example, you might not be able to report a slander, but you can report that "DC insiders are buzzing" about the contents of the slander. That way you avoid saying if the slander is true or false, and you avoid a lawsuit, while still pumping that information out into the world.
The New York Times used this backdoor defamation when they reported not that John McCain was having an affair with a lobbyist, but merely that "insiders" were "concerned" about the excessive time and attention he was giving this woman. Hint, hint. See, they can't say he's having an affair, because they don't have confirmation, so they'll just talk about his "insiders" worrying he's having an affair.
Now I totally believe he was having an affair -- he is and always was trash -- but "reporters" aren't supposed to report claims they can't verify.
The "news hook" approach lets them get around that impediment.
Now, when CNN told Comey that they needed a "news hook" to report on the "dossier," he got together with Brennan and Clapper to paper-clip the dossier to one of Trump's intelligence briefings. They told Trump not to even worry about it, because it was all unverified "scurrilous" gossip, so he didn't.
But then they immediately leaked the fact that it had been paperclipped to the intelligence briefing to CNN, providing CNN with its "news hook" for reporting Hillary Clinton campaign oppo nonsense with no verification. CNN didn't report the contents of the dossier, which was unverified and WITHOUT EVIDENCE as Jake Tapper's snarky chyrons like to say, but they could not report that Trump was briefed about its contents.
This achieved just what the conspirators Brennan, Clapper, Comey, as well as Tapper, Perez, Bernstein, and Sciutto wanted -- they legitimized the dossier by having the highly-partisan "intelligence" heads recognize it as worth briefing to the president, which made it worth Tapper telling his seventeen viewers about.
From the start, the paperclipping of the dossier wasn't intended to inform the president, it was to create a pretextual "news hook" for Hillary Clinton's oppo dump lies that were otherwise unreportable.
"This led to Mueller [special counsel Robert Mueller's inquiry, which concluded after two years that there was no Trump-Russia collusion]. It put the seal of approval of the intelligence community that Russia was helping Trump and that the Steele dossier was the scandal of our lifetime. It ate up the first two years of his [Trump's first] presidency.
"You see how Brennan and Clapper and Comey manipulated [and] silenced all the career professionals and railroaded the process."
The CIA review notes that, before work even began on the ICA, "media leaks suggesting that the Intelligence Community had already reached definitive conclusions risked creating an anchoring." The term "anchoring" refers to a cognitive bias in psychology and suggests that the media leaks may have influenced the analysts working on the ICA to shape their findings to conform with the leaked narrative rather than conducting an objective analysis.
On December 9, 2016, both the Washington Post and New York Times reported the IC had "concluded with high confidence that Russia had intervened specifically to help Trump win the election."
The Post cited an unnamed US official describing this as the IC's "consensus view."
The "highly compressed timeline was atypical for a formal IC assessment which ordinarily can take months to prepare, especially for assessments of such length, complexity, and political sensitivity," the review found. "CIA's primary authors had less than a week to draft the assessment and less than two days to formally coordinate it with IC peers before it entered the formal review process at CIA on December 20."
...
The review criticizes the ICA for including the Steele dossier, a salacious and discredited opposition-research product written by former British spy Christopher Steele, who was working for the Hillary Clinton campaign, which claimed Russia possessed sexually compromising blackmail material on Trump.
Despite the fact that "the ICA authors and multiple senior CIA managers -- including the two senior leaders of the CIA mission center responsible for Russia -- strongly opposed including the Dossier, asserting that it did not meet even the most basic tradecraft standards," Brennan insisted it be included.
"CIA's Deputy Director for Analysis (DDA) warned in an email to Brennan on December 29 that including it in any form risked 'the credibility of the entire paper.'"
But Brennan responded that "my bottom line is that I believe that the information warrants inclusion in the report."
Brennan showed "a preference for narrative consistency over analytical soundness," said the review.
No, he included the dossier just so he could then phone Tapper and say, "It's done, we paperclipped it to Trump's report, you can report on the dossier now, we made your 'news hook' for you."
None of this caused Tapper, Perez, Sciutto, or Bernstein any consternation, and none of them admitted that their sources were so riven by partisan political animus that they tricked Trump into accepting a "briefing" just so that briefing could be reported within days on CNN.
Read all of Miranda Divine's report. It's good.
Paul Sperry
@paulsperry_
BREAKING: The highly classified version of the Obama-ordered CIA report on Russian 2016 interference includes in main body a reference to the debunked Steele dossier "as the 4th supporting bullet for the judgment Putin 'aspired' to help Trump win," new after-action review reveals
HUGE: Just-released CIA after-action review of Obama/Brennan's 2017 ICA re Russia-Trump shoots down media narrative ICA didnt rely on Hillary dossier. IT DID. The dossier not only was summarized and attached as an annex but referred to in "the main body" of the classified version
BREAKING: In a Dec. 29, 2016 email, the CIA's deputy director for analysis warned director Brennan that inclg the debunked Steele dossier in the classified ICA risked "the credibility of the entire paper," but Brennan insisted: "The information warrants inclusion in the report."
BREAKING: On Dec. 18, 2016--before the ICA was finalized--Brennan sent a pressure note to CIA officials and analysts that he'd met with Comey and Clapper and that "there is strong consensus among us on the scope, nature and INTENT of Russian interference in our recent election."
BREAKING: In crafting the 2016 Intelligence Community Assessment on "Russian interference," Brennan shut out not only DIA and DOS' Bureau of Intelligence and Research but also the National Intelligence Council, which w/ NSA might have added dissent re his Putin-Trump conclusions.
REAKING: Brennan withheld the fact he was including the Hillary dossier from key CIA analysts authoring the ICA until Dec. 20, 2016, when the first ICA draft was entering the review process. When CIA officials confronted Brennan with flaws in the dossier, Brennan overruled them.
Meanwhile: Christopher Wray blocked a report about China interfering in our politics on Biden's behalf because he had previously falsely declared there was no such interference.
So he ordered the Albany FBI office to withdraw their report so as not to discredit his perjurious congressional testimony.
Catherine Herridge
@C__Herridge
NEW: Heavily redacted @FBI emails released via @ChuckGrassley @FBIDirectorKash
- FBI HQ interfered with Albany NY investigation into alleged Chinese 2020 Election Interference
- Designed to shield then FBI Director Wray from political blowback over his Congressional testimony
- Emails suggest FBI HQ was focused on optics, not fact finding two months before the election
AMONG KEY EMAILS: pg. 23
"A new 1023 will be needed, that will have updated date of acquisition and contact, with an updated source context statement. AND it will have to run the gamut at HQ for review/approval.
Again, the reporting will contradict Director Wrays testimony."
NOTE: FD-1023 is used to record information from
confidential human sources
Paul Sperry
@paulsperry_
BREAKING: Internal FBI emails released by Senate Judiciary reveal the FBI suppressed intelligence of alleged pro-Biden Chinese interference in the 2020 election to insulate then-director Wray from criticism, after Wray provided "inaccurate and contradictory testimony" to Congress
BREAKING: A declassified Sept 2020 intel report from an FBI CHS warning a Chinese plot to use data from U.S. TikTok accounts to create "tens of thousands" of fake Chinese student mail-in votes for Biden was recalled by FBI HQ "for a political reason," FBI intel analyst complained
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) today released internal Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) emails revealing the FBI suppressed intelligence of alleged Chinese interference in the 2020 election to insulate then-FBI Director Christopher Wray from criticism, after Wray provided inaccurate and contradictory testimony to Congress.
The FBI declassified and provided the requested records to Grassley, along with an accompanying cover letter, after Grassley initially received some information from whistleblower disclosures. The FBI emails offer an inside look at the Bureau's decision to recall and suppress an Intelligence Information Report (IIR) from the FBI's Albany Field Office on September 25, 2020. The IIR contained information from an FBI Confidential Human Source (CHS) alleging the Chinese government was producing "tens of thousands" of fraudulent drivers' licenses to manufacture mail-in votes for then-presidential candidate Joe Biden in the 2020 election.
According to the FBI, these allegations, despite showing initial signs of credibility, were allegedly never fully investigated due to the FBI's sudden and "abnormal" decision to halt the investigation and bury the IIR's existence, preventing any additional FBI field offices, as well as other Intelligence Community elements, from accessing or studying the document. The FBI's stated reason for doing so was because "the reporting will contradict Director Wray's testimony."
"These records smack of political decision-making and prove the Wray-led FBI to be a deeply broken institution. Ahead of a high-stakes election happening amid an unprecedented global pandemic, the FBI turned its back on its national security mission," Grassley said. "One way or the other, intelligence must be fully investigated to determine whether it's true, or if it's just smoke and mirrors. Chris Wray's FBI wasn't looking out for the American people -- it was looking to save its own image. Now's the time to rebuild the FBI's trust. Director Patel's willingness to work with me to establish renewed transparency and accountability is a critical part of that process, and I applaud him for his efforts."
Political Reasoning
Following the IIR's recall, an FBI Albany intelligence analyst summarized the concerning series of events that led to the suppression:
"Most concerning to me, is stating the reporting would contradict with Director Wray's testimony. I found this troubling because it implied to me that one of the reasons we aren't putting this out is for a political reason, which goes directly against our organization's mission to remain apolitical and simply state what we know. Likewise, at the field operational level, I do not feel it is our job to assess whether or not our intelligence aligns with the Director.... My concern is that I think it gets dangerous if we cite potential political implications as reasons for not putting out our information."
Source Credibility
An FBI Albany official noted "the IIR was coordinated and disseminated in textbook fashion." Further, a re-interview of the FBI CHS yielded additional context that supported the initial IIR's findings. An FBI Albany official described the CHS as "competent" and "authentic in his/her reporting." The CHS described the confidence in his/her sub-sourcing as a "9-10 range. [V]ery, very confident."
Decision for Recall
According to an Assistant Section Chief in the FBI's Counterintelligence Division, the IIR immediately generated "a lot of attention from all [Headquarter] divisions."
Upon receiving the IIR, an FBI Albany official stated, "We have no reason to recall at this point." Minutes later, the Albany Field Office was commanded to recall the IIR at the direct request of officials at FBI Headquarters, including Nikki Floris, then-Deputy Assistant Director (DAD) of the FBI's Counterintelligence Division. Months before dismissing the IIR, Floris provided an unnecessary briefing to Grassley and Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) regarding their investigation into the Biden family. The briefing -- though classified -- was later leaked to the press in an effort to falsely smear the senators' investigation as Russian disinformation.
Following the IIR's recall, FBI Headquarters informed field offices that "all raw reporting concerning the election will now require [Headquarters] coordination," which had not been previously required.
In other words: The political commissars at the FBI get to scrub any reports vindicating Trump or proving that the Chinese rigged the election to Biden.
Was Wray pardoned? I don't think he was.