If there’s one takeaway from the latest document dump from Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, it’s this: If all assessments are accurate, Russian President Vladimir Putin could have been even harder on Hillary Clinton’s chances in the 2016 election if he wanted to be.
The latest declassified report came Wednesday, when the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released a House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence report from September of 2020.
That report looked mostly at the failings of the intelligence community assessment of January 2017, which found significant meddling by Russian intelligence in the 2016 presidential election despite what the committee found to be dodgy sources.
However, the picture it paints of Clinton is damning — namely, that she had significant physical and emotional health problems known to both the Democratic National Committee and Russian intelligence, that the Democrats wanted Russia on Clinton’s side so bad it was willing to offer “the patronage” of the Department of State in “post-Soviet” countries, and that the Kremlin knew of meddling by the DNC and Clinton campaign into the investigation into her classified email scandal.
In addition, the 2017 report “ignored strong indicators” that Putin’s “actions could also indicate that he preferred to see Secretary Clinton elected, knowing that she would be a more vulnerable President than candidate Trump” and that “Moscow’s reserve of compromising materials would have given Putin leverage over a Clinton Administration, but not a Trump one.”
Perhaps the most damning excerpts had to do with the alleged secret meetings in which the promise of support for Russia in the former Soviet sphere was offered if they’d get behind Clinton.
“The Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) in August had details of secret meetings with multiple named U.S. religious organizations, in which U.S. State Department representatives offered — in exchange for supporting Secretary Clinton — ‘significant increases in financing’ from Department funds and ‘the patronage’ of State in dealing with ‘post-Soviet’ countries,” the report reads.
While details are scant on most of these, as a House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence report, it carries some weight.
Similarly, the revelations on the emailgate matters were equally problematic.
According to the document, the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, or SVR, “possessed a campaign email discussing a plan approved by Secretary Clinton to link Putin and Russian hackers to candidate Trump in order to ‘distract the [American] public’ from the Clinton email server scandal.”
Other revelations about the email scandal were bad, as well.
“The SVR reported in January 2016 that it had information taken from a U.S. think tank indicating that a high ranking official in the Democratic National Committee (DNC) knew about the application of political pressure on the FBI in the Clinton email investigation by a high ranking official of the U.S. Department of Justice,” it reads.
“In March 2016, the SVR had intercepted discussions between a high-ranking DNC official and a U.S. non-government organization indicating that a Clinton staffer was receiving updates on the FBI’s Clinton email investigation from a high ranking Department of Justice official.”
This jibes with testimony former FBI Director James Comey gave the committee that the SVR had DNC emails that involved the head of the DNC “telling people that [former Attorney General] Lynch was working to control me.”
Then comes the assessment of Hillary’s health — previously thought to be just a conspiracy theory on the American right, but apparently taken very seriously by Russian intelligence.
“As of September 2016, the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) had Democratic National Committee (DNC) information that President Obama and party leaders found the state of Secretary Clinton’s health to be ‘extraordinarily alarming’ and felt it could have ‘serious negative impact’ on her election prospects,” the assessment read.
“The SVR possessed DNC communications that Clinton was suffering from ‘intensified psycho-emotional problems, including uncontrolled fits of anger, aggression, and cheerfulness,’” the document added.
All of this leads to one of the more sobering conclusions from the document: “It is difficult to justify the [intelligence community] judgment that Putin ‘aspired’ to help Trump win by discrediting Secretary Clinton, given that in the closing weeks of the campaign — when such devastating leaks could have been decisive — President Putin elected not to inject this material into the campaign.”
Hence the reason why the book must remain open on whether or not Putin preferred Clinton or Trump. Is this information true? I don’t know how much if any of it is, but it’s safe to say that Russian intelligence either possessed it or was willing to pretend it possessed it — and given Clinton and the DNC’s carelessness with email and other communications, it’s not out of the question that this stuff managed to pass into Moscow’s hands.
True or not, it would have been infinitely more helpful — particularly as the polls narrowed in the final weeks of the campaign — to pump this stuff into the American body politic if there was some sort of massive Muscovite conspiracy to throw the 2016 election to Donald Trump. There was not such a move. Hillary Clinton’s implosion was entirely self-manufactured.
Yet, after watching their candidate effectively shoot herself in the foot, outgoing President Barack Obama and his team did everything to shove the smoking gun into whoever’s hand it would fit in. Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, Carter Page, Michael Flynn, George Papadopoulos, whoever. And now, as details of how that hoax went leak into the public eye, we’re supposed to blame Tulsi Gabbard for not using language the media likes.
Whatever. It may be almost a decade on, but the Democrats still own every bit of this disaster — both the election loss and the Russiagate hoax that followed.
Advertise with The Western Journal and reach millions of highly engaged readers, while supporting our work. Advertise Today.