Newly declassified documents confirm that Obama-era intelligence officials pushed the discredited Steele dossier that served as the nexus of the Russia collusion hoax in a bid to kneecap Donald Trump before he could set foot in the White House. But instead of reckoning with the truth, the propaganda press is scrambling to discredit the revelations — not because the evidence is lacking, but because it’s a damning indictment of the media’s complicity.
Nine years ago, the media breathlessly peddled the now discredited claim that then-candidate Trump colluded with Russia to win the 2016 election. At the heart of the hoax was the Steele dossier — opposition research created by a former British spy, paid for by Hillary Clinton’s campaign, and laundered into the intelligence community.
On Wednesday, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard declassified a 2020 report by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence showing — among other things — that members of the intelligence community were concerned with several aspects of the dossier, such as credibility. In fact, according to the report, two senior CIA officers contended that the dossier should have been omitted from the ICA “because it failed to meet basic tradecraft standards.” In fact, the information in the dossier was so flawed that “every CIA analyst and operations officer” asked about the dossier made sure to “emphasize that they had nothing to do with the decision to include Annex A” and could not “vouch” for it.
Pretty damming, right? And that’ not even half of it. Additional coverage of the findings can be found here, here, and here.
One would think the media would be all over a story this explosive — historic levels of government corruption and a weaponized intel apparatus. While a functioning press would be digging into this (like us here at The Federalist!), the propaganda press is actually doing the opposite, trying to discredit the news.
“Trump’s intel chief Tulsi Gabbard reignites political battles with 2016 election documents on Russia,” CBS News’ Olivia Victoria Gazis wrote.
“‘It’s just wildly misleading’: Why the administration’s latest allegations about the Russia investigation don’t add up,” read a headline from CNN’s Jeremy Herb and Katie Bo Lillis.
Ironically, Herb and Lillis (the latter of which was involved in a massive defamation case this year that ended with a jury finding CNN is literally fake news) claim the declassified document “conflate[s] and misrepresent[s]” the findings of the intelligence community. But according to the declassified report, the Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) “misrepresented both the significance and credibility of the dossier reports.”
“Trump rehashes years-old grievances on Russia investigation after new intelligence report,” The Associated Press’ Erick Tucker and Chris Megerian wrote. According to the Bobbsey twins, decisions to review the corrupt intelligence apparatus and their involvement in the 2016 Russia collusion hoax is “backward-looking.”
“Gabbard Releases New Documents Targeting Obama Administration,” The New York Times’ Julian E. Barnes wrote.
“The new material provides some interesting insights into the development of the review of Russian activity by American spy agencies, and the debate over their assessment,” Barnes writes before immediately trying to downplay the significance: “But none of the new information changes the fundamental view that Russia meddled in the election and that Mr. Putin hoped to damage Hillary Clinton.”
The newly declassified report states that while the ICA found that Russian President Vladimir Putin did order “cyber influence operations” and tried to “undermine faith in the US democratic process,” the determination that Putin preferred then-candidate Donald Trump “did not adhere to the tenets of the ICD [Intelligence Community Directive] standards.”
Nonetheless, the propaganda headlines persist:
“Gabbard declassifies new docs in latest push to cast doubt on Russia assessment,” Politico’s John Sakellariadis wrote.
“Trump’s intelligence chiefs try to rewrite the history of the 2016 election,” NBC News’ Dan De Luce wrote, alleging that “Trump’s intelligence chiefs are conducting a systematic campaign to rewrite the history of the 2016 election, seeking to reverse an eight-year-old assessment that Russia waged an information war to boost Trump’s candidacy.”
But the administration isn’t trying to “rewrite” the history of the 2016 election — it’s correcting the record. The same record the left wing media helped falsify.
The reason the propaganda press is clinging to this “eight-year-old assessment” is simple: they sold it to the American public as fact. They used it as the basis to justify Democrats’ false claims that Trump was a puppet of Putin, to push the Russia collusion hoax, and to undermine the will of the American electorate. But the newly declassified document shows there was never enough credible evidence linking Trump to Russia’s efforts and no solid basis for claiming Putin specifically wanted Trump to win. In fact, the report shows Russia possessed damaging intelligence on Clinton’s deteriorating medical condition — information they deliberately chose to withhold. If Russia’s goal was solely to help Trump, they’d have released that information.
When the propaganda press peddled these flimsy, suspicious claims back in 2016 it wasn’t because the evidence was strong, it was because the narrative served their interests. From the moment Trump descended the golden escalator, the corporate press saw its job not as informing the public, but running interference for the Democrat Party. They ran with these politicized findings from the intelligence community because they were propagandists. So reporting honestly on the newly declassified findings would mean admitting they are indeed propagandists and were involved in peddling a hoax that has done nothing but collapse since the day it was created.