Matt Taibbi on the central role John Brennan played in legitimizing Hillary Clinton's completely fake oppo research "dossier" into a product of official US intelligence:

Miranda Devine of the New York Post, who broke the fateful story about Hunter Biden's laptop, has struck again with an exposé on the origins of Russiagate that implicates former intelligence chiefs John Brennan, James Comey, and Jim Clapper in an elaborate fraud. From the story, which is centered on a new CIA report commissioned by John Ratcliffe:

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.'"

The CIA report is focused mainly on the publication of the infamous Intelligence Community Assessment of January 6th, 2017, which concluded that Russian President Vladimir Putin sought "to undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability" while maintaining a "clear preference for President-elect Trump." Publication of that Intelligence Assessment, which was ordered by Barack Obama on December 6th, 2016 and included material from the infamous Steele dossier, set in motion a series of events that led to Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation. It was the trigger for years of Russiagate lunacy that consumed Trump's first term.

Racket readers may remember reports I co-authored with Michael Shellenberger and Alexandra Gutentag last February, describing how Brennan, Comey, and Clapper "cooked the intelligence" in that 2017 ICA. For instance, the chiefs suppressed junior analysts' belief that Russia may not have preferred Trump, seeing him as "mercurial," "unreliable," and "not steady," while viewing a possible Clinton presidency as "manageable and reflecting continuity." The notion that the ICA was manipulated isn't new, as Aaron Mate at RealClearInvestigations reported the ICA's preparation "deviated from standard CIA practice," and similar reports came out via former CIA analyst Ray McGovern, current deputy FBI director Dan Bongino, and others.

However, this new report contains a wealth of new details. It's not clear what this may or may not mean for any possible future criminal investigation, but Ratcliffe's CIA investigation fills in a lot of blanks. Some key conclusions:

CIA chief was warned not to include the Steele Dossier

The new CIA report criticizes the intel chiefs for including the Steele Dossier in the report, saying that "ran counter to fundamental tradecraft principles" and "undermined the credibility" of his key conclusions. That isn't just a post-factum conclusion, however. The report reveals:

CIA's Deputy Director for Analysis (DDA) warned in an email to Brennan on 29 December that including it in any form risked "the credibility of the entire paper."

Thanks to previous reports (including material from John Brennan's own book Undaunted), it was already known that Brennan not only overruled NSA chief Mike Rogers but "two senior managers for the CIA mission center for Russia" to reach the much-disputed conclusion that Putin "aspired" to help Donald Trump win the election. The new CIA report's inclusion of an email from a senior CIA official specifically warning against use of the Steele Dossier is damning.

Regarding the objections of those two "senior managers," Ratcliffe had more detail:

The two senior leaders of the CIA mission center responsible for Russia argued jointly against including the "aspire" judgment. In an email to Brennan on 30 December, they stated the judgment should be removed because it was both weakly supported and unnecessary, given the strength and logic of the paper's other findings on intent. They warned that including it would only "open up a line of very politicized inquiry."

It's one thing for Ratcliffe to criticize the ICA, but these specific email warnings add significantly to the pile of evidence that the key pillar of Russiagate was manipulated.

Taibbi writes that the FBI only endorsed the fake "intelligence" report because they themselves had predicated their illegal surveillance of Trump on the Steele Dossier -- and were eager to sign up for any report that legitimized their own crimes.

Why the FBI endorsed the ICA

According to the report:

FBI leadership made it clear that their participation in the ICA hinged on the Dossier's inclusion and, over the next few days, repeatedly pushed to weave references to it throughout the main body of the ICA.

This is a significant revelation, because while the NSA expressed only "moderate" confidence in the Intelligence Assessment, the FBI appeared to change its mind.

On October 31, 2016, a week before Obama ordered the ICA written, senior FBI officials told the New York Times in a much-criticized piece called "Investigating Donald Trump, F.B.I. Sees No Clear Link to Russia" that "even the hacking into Democratic emails, F.B.I. and intelligence officials now believe, was aimed at disrupting the presidential election rather than electing Mr. Trump." In the first week of December 2016, the FBI and CIA reportedly gave conflicting briefings to Congress on the question. Shortly after, the FBI publicly backed the CIA's interpretation.

The reason for the FBI's turnaround has always been a mystery. <if the="" fbi's="" participation="" in="" intelligence="" community="" assessment="" was="" contingent="" on="" cia="" publicly="" backing="" steele="" dossier,="" it="" might="" answer="" that="" question.<b=""> The FBI by December 2016 already knew it had an issue with its use of the Steele Dossier to obtain FISA surveillance on Carter Page, and the FBI's lead Trump-Russia investigator Peter Strzok had privately questioned Steele's reliability. By inducing the CIA to throw its weight behind the flawed document (one the CIA itself had pooh-poohed as "internet rumor"), the FBI and Comey gained crucial bureaucratic cover.

And, of course:

It was Brennan all along

From the report:

One business day before IC analysts convened for the only coordination session on the ICA, Brennan sent a note to the CIA workforce stating he had met with the DNI and FBI Director and that "there is strong consensus among us on the scope, nature, and intent of Russian interference in our recent Presidential election." While officers involved in drafting the ICA consistently said they did not feel pressured ...Brennan's premature signaling... risked stifling analytic debate.

As has been made clear, there was no "strong consensus" about Russia's intentions among the three agencies. The NSA was lukewarm at best, the FBI gave public statements contradicting the ICA conclusions, and even within the CIA -- even within Brennan's hand-picked group of CIA analysts -- there was serious dissent. Brennan steamrolled that dissent in a number of ways, beginning with this "premature signaling" effort, and moving on to override his own team.

Ratcliffe wrote that "Brennan showed a preference for narrative consistency over analytical soundness," describing a scene in which he overrode the objections to the Steele Dossier by those two CIA "mission center for Russia" analysts. When confronted, Brennan reportedly said, "My bottom line is that I believe that the information warrants inclusion in the report."

Overall, the report looks very bad for the intelligence chiefs Brennan, Comey, and Clapper, who submitted the flawed ICA to the National Intelligence Council just "hours before it was due to be published," as Devine wrote. Those same figures then briefed President-Elect Trump about the ICA's contents, ostensibly to warn him about the possibility of Russian efforts to compromise him. Shortly after, the details of that briefing were leaked to the press. In this manner, the otherwise classified issue of "blackmail" and the pee tape and so on became public, leading to years of the Russiagate circus.

Now Miranda Divine is back with a new report: Brennan mau face perjury charges over his false testimony to Congress, denying his central role in the conspiracy.

John Brennan, the disgraced former Obama CIA director, may have opened himself up to perjury charges after a new email was uncovered in a scathing internal review by CIA career professionals of the agency's 2016 Trump-Russia collusion assessment.

Brennan is said to be under renewed scrutiny by authorities over discrepancies between his sworn testimony to federal investigations and his written orders to underlings conducting the Intelligence Community Assessment commissioned by President Barack Obama in December 2016 that found Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election to help Donald Trump.

The review, declassified last week, found that Brennan 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."
John Brennan testifying before the House Intelligence Committee.

Then-CIA Deputy Director for Analysis (DDA) David Cohen warned in an email to Brennan on December 29 that including the dossier in any form risked "the credibility of the entire paper."

But Brennan "formalized his position in writing, stating that 'my bottom line is that I believe that the information warrants inclusion in the report.' "

...

Last week's CIA review by the deputy director of analysis found that when Brennan was "confronted with specific flaws in the Dossier by the two [Russia] mission center leaders -- one with extensive operational experience and the other with a strong analytic background -- he appeared more swayed by the Dossier's general conformity with existing theories than by legitimate tradecraft concerns."

The decision to include the Steele dossier in the assessment "ran counter to fundamental tradecraft principles and ultimately undermined the credibility of a key judgment."

...

Including the dossier reference in the main body of the ICA "implicitly elevated unsubstantiated claims to the status of credible supporting evidence, compromising the analytical integrity of the judgment."

By forcing the dossier into the ICA, the virulently anti-Trump Brennan also elevated the credibility of the vile fictional smear sheet which he had been shopping to Democratic leaders and the press during the 2016 election campaign.

The review found that former FBI Director James Comey also insisted on the dossier's inclusion in the ICA. "FBI leadership made it clear that their participation in the ICA hinged on the Dossier's inclusion and, over the next few days, repeatedly pushed to weave references to it throughout the main body of the ICA."

Again, reinforcing the idea that Comey wanted the Steele Dossier included because the needed it to be legitimized to justify his illegal spying on Trump.

Yet in congressional testimony under oath on May 23, 2017, Brennan claimed 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."

Now we know that is not true. The Steele dossier was forced into the ICA by Brennan and it appeared not just in the "annex" but was referenced in the main body of the ICA that ended up triggering the investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller that crippled the first two years of Trump's first term and served to delegitimize his 2016 election victory.

Brennan continued to play innocent in various media interviews, including those he was paid for as an MSNBC contributor. In 2018, he told NBC's "Meet the Press" that he first heard "just snippets about" the Steele dossier in the "late summer of 2016."