Documents released over the last month have exposed a post-election plot designed to derail President Donald Trump’s first term. The recently declassified material reveals former President Barack Obama sought to continue the Russia-collusion hoax Hillary Clinton had launched during the presidential campaign by directing select members of his intelligence community to craft the deceptive Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) on Russia’s efforts to influence the 2016 election. However, a close reading of these documents reveals Obama holds even more culpability than previously discussed.
As The Federalist reported earlier, the CIA’s review of the ICA established Obama not only knew of and “condoned the politicalization of the intelligence community, but that the former president directed the politicalization.” According to the CIA’s “lessons learned” analysis of the deceptive ICA released by the Obama Administration, on December 6, 2016, then-President Obama directed “then-Director of National Intelligence (DNI) James Clapper to conduct a comprehensive review of all available intelligence and provide the IC’s best assessment of Russian activities related to the election,” ordering Clapper to complete the review before Trump’s inauguration. And according to former CIA Director John Brennan, the White House worked with him to “established crucial elements of the process,” including directing the CIA to take “the lead drafting the report.”
That White House-directed process included sidelining the National Intelligence Council (“NIC”) which, under standard protocols held “control over drafting assignments, coordination, and review processes” for intelligence assessments. Not only that, but Brennan — the man Obama charged with leading the drafting of the ICA — also marginalized CIA and ODNI analysts, ignoring their conclusion that intel did not support the view that Russia “aspired” to help Trump win the 2016 election. Brennan also trumped the analysts’ objection to referencing the Steele dossier in the text of the ICA and including a summary of the Clinton-funded fake dossier in an annex to the report.
Last week’s release of the House Permanent Selection Committee on Intelligence’s (“HPSCI”) report summarizing the results of its investigation into the drafting of the ICA exposed further corruption behind the assessment that falsely reported Russia aspired to help elect Trump. That 46-page report revealed how, after the election, Brennan ordered the publication of three substandard intelligence reports which, along with the Steele dossier, “became foundational sources for the ICA judgments that Putin preferred Trump over Clinton.”
The HPSCI report also detailed the flaws in that intel, as well as how the ICA further misrepresented what the belatedly created intelligence reports stated. The HPSCI report further highlighted the extensive evidence omitted from the ICA — intel which conflicted with the Obama-ordered assessment’s conclusion that Russia aspired to help Trump. The Federalist summarized these top take-aways last week.
However, the recently declassified HPSCI report also revealed a more subtle — but equally significant — detail, namely Obama’s role in hiding intel from the analysts responsible for drafting the ICA.
“Investigators as well as the ICA authors were denied access to a trove of information on grounds of executive or congressional privilege,” the HPSCI report explained. According to the report, one FBI analyst argued the intel should be shared with analysts, but “that the Obama Administration denied ICA drafters access to this intelligence on grounds of Executive or Congressional privilege.”
While it is unclear what intel would be protected by congressional privilege, executive privilege rests in the president of the United States, meaning Barack Obama prevented the drafters of the ICA from reviewing relevant information.
What intel Obama directed Brennan and others to keep from those drafting the ICA is also unclear, but the recent release by Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, of internal emails related to the ICA suggest the material withheld under the guise of executive privilege, or elsewise, was extensive.
A little over a week ago, Director Gabbard released a report revealing that soon after Obama ordered the rushed crafting of the ICA, a top official in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) eighty-sixed an already completed President’s Daily Brief that concluded Russia had not hacked the 2016 presidential election. As The Federalist reported at the time, emails declassified by Director Gabbard indicate the ODNI “buried the PDB to provide the intelligence community cover to issue a contrary assessment concerning Russia’s efforts to interfere in the 2016 election — and did so, against the recommendations of a wide array of intelligence professionals.”
In addition to that explosive news, another email thread in the hundred-plus pages of declassified emails revealed another shocking detail: The intelligence officer charged with conducting an “analytic scrub” of the “noncompartmented” version of the ICA had no knowledge that the ICA report referenced, much less relied upon, the Steele dossier.
Director Gabbard’s report referred to this analyst as an “ODNI Whistleblower,” noting that he was shocked when asked as part of a FOIA request in September of 2019 to search email systems for material related to the Steele dossier, being told “the dossier was a factor in the 2017 ICA on the election interference in which an assessment of the document was added as an annex.”
“I am choosing my words carefully, for your awareness, because the premise of the message is concerning,” the ODNI whistleblower wrote in response to learning the dossier was relied upon in completing the ICA. Then, after explaining his role in the development of the ICA, the whistleblower stressed, “[i]t included no dossier reference that I recall.” Further, “[a]t no point did [redacted name] suggest that there was any analytically significant reporting that I was NOT seeing, with the exception of compartmented material.” And here, the whistleblower noted that he had “asked repeatedly” whether there was any analytically significant reporting because of “concerns” he held regarding a key judgment of the analysis.
“At no point did I see or consider what I gather is, or was represented to be, ‘dossier’ materials,” the ODNI whistleblower’s email to another member of ODNI continued, adding that he “heard second hand from [redacted name], ostensibly recounting words of then DNI Clapper, on the day of a briefing to current [then, I think, just elect] POTUS, about inclusion of dossier materials in a presentation to POTUS elect. This was characterized as an unexpected and unwanted sudden and unilateral act by then DIR FBI Comey, and as a source of concern to the DNI.”
Of course, that was not true, as both Director Clapper and CIA Director Brennan colluded with Comey to include the dossier in an annex. But the DNI intelligence officer, turned ODNI whistleblower, who worked on the ICA knew nothing about the assessment’s reliance on the dossier. This led him to conclude that “IF the Dossier material WAS used by the NIC, unless it is also compartmented,” he was “deceived and excluded [] from things [he] was cleared for and had need to know, . . . .”
Here, the ODNI whistleblower is both right — and wrong. He properly concludes that he was deceived and excluded from things he was cleared for and had a need to know, but he inaccurately assumes that if the dossier was “compartmented” there was no concern.
“Compartmented” information is tightly held intelligence that is accessible only to specifically identified and approved individuals. The ODNI whistleblower noted in his emails that he had not “participate[d] in the crafting of the compartmented version” of the ICA, assuming that fact might explain away his ignorance about the ICA’s reliance on the Steele dossier.
But that does not explain why the Steele dossier was compartmented in the first place. Or rather, it does: to keep the honest analysts responsible for finalizing the classified and unclassified version of the ICA from discovering the shady and fake intel Brennan buried in the compartmented version.
In discussing the compartmentalizing of the intel for the ICA, the CIA’s report questioned “whether the extreme limitations on access to underlying intelligence within the IC during the ICA’s preparation was justified.” Here, the CIA stressed that the “ICA had been shared with more than 200 US officials.” “This is unusually high for such a highly compartmented product,” the CIA noted in questioning the compartmentalization of the materials.
While the compartmentalized version of the ICA has yet to be declassified, the HPSCI report released last week reveals large swaths of intel that were included only in the compartmentalized version and thus withheld from analysts working on the classified and unclassified versions. The HPSCI report stressed this point, explaining “the highly compartmented nature of the raw reporting made it difficult or impossible for most readers to see the foundational sources.”
The Steele dossier was but one of the documents included in the compartmentalized ICA but excluded from the public and classified versions of the report. This reality becomes clear when you compare what the HPSCI report states about the ICA with the previously classified version of the ICA that Director Gabbard recently released.
For example, in the previously classified version, Annex A is entitled “Possible State-Level Election Network Breaches and Related Intrusions.” In contrast, Annex A in the Compartmented ICA is entitled “Additional Reporting from an FBI Source on Russian Influence Efforts.” Also omitted from the previously classified version of the ICA is the fourth bullet of supporting evidence for the assessment that the Russian “influence campaign aspired to help (Trump’s) chances of victory,” that referred the reader to the detailed summary and analysis of the dossier.
The HPSCI report also revealed that the Compartmented ICA explained that it made “some judgments based on the reporting of an established clandestine source with secondhand access through identified subsources.” “The source is well established, and other examples of reporting have been corroborated through other streams of human and signals intelligence,” according to the Compartmented ICA. The Compartmented ICA added that that “established source with secondhand access provided us our only specific information on President Vladimir Putin’s order to pass collected material to Wikileaks: the timing of the formal influence campaign; the existence of specific, planned Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) efforts; some specific details of Putin’s views of Secretary Clinton; and the reported role of the Federal Security Service (FSB) hacking operations related to the US election.”
That single source had reported in July that “Putin had made this decision [to leak DNC emails] after he had come to believe that the Democratic nominee had better odds of winning the U.S. presidential election, and that [candidate Trump], whose victory Putin was counting on, most likely would not be able to pull off a convincing victory.” Then after Obama directed Brennan to craft the ICA, the former CIA director ordered that purported intel to be documented — something that had not been done at the time the source made the claim. It then served as the sole source of classified information cited in support of the conclusion that Putin aspired to help Trump win the election.
As the HPSCI report detailed, beyond the flaws in the intel — including that it was single-sourced and based on a sub-source’s supposed insight into Putin’s perspective — the “whose victory Putin was counting on” was hopelessly ambiguous. As one senior CIA officer put it, “We don’t know what was meant by that,” with “five people read[ing] it five ways.” Also, as the HPSCI report highlighted, that statement was made before Trump was officially nominated at the Republican convention, making it more reasonable to believe Putin meant he was counting on Trump winning the Republican nomination.
But that single-source intel remained compartmentalized, preventing those reviewing the classified and public versions of the ICA from learning of those flaws. In fact, the previously classified and public versions of the ICA made no reference to the single “clandestine” source discussed in the compartmentalized ICA. Instead, the noncompartmentalized reports stated that “[m]any of the key judgments in this assessment rely on a body of reporting from multiple sources that are consistent with our understanding of Russian behavior.” The noncompartmented ICAs also represented that “[i]nsights into Russian efforts — including specific cyber operations — and Kremlin views of key US players like President-elect Trump and Secretary Clinton derive from multiple corroborating sources.”
Given the many problems with the single-source reporting used to supposedly support the idea that Putin aspired for Trump to win, it is readily apparent why Obama’s minions sought to keep that “intel” compartmentalized. In fact, it is only now, nearly five years after HPSCI, under the leadership of then-Chair Devin Nunes, completed its investigation into the ICA, that Americans are learning these details. Before last week’s declassification, the HPSCI report remained sequestered at CIA headquarters: Even the current HPSCI chair lacked access to the report until recently.
With the compartmentalized version of the ICA still classified — and possibly still compartmentalized at the CIA — the HPSCI report proves indispensable for understanding what supposed intel Obama withheld from the intelligence community under the guise of executive privilege or by directing Clapper, Brennan, Comey, and crew to limit access to the materials.
Not only does this represent a scandal in its own right, but Sunday on Sunday Morning Futures, former HPSCI Chair Nunes told Maria Bartiromo he believes the Biden Administration raided Mar-a-Lago in part to look for a copy of the HPSCI’s report. Given the former Republican congressman’s track record in exposing the Russia-collusion hoax and the corruption of the intelligence community, DOJ, and FBI, odds are he’s right — and that would mean the conspiracy launched nearly a decade ago by then-President Obama continued after he left office and well within any statute of limitations.