The Russia hoax was built on a six-word sentence fragment that entirely lacked context or credibility, according to a report declassified by Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Tulsi Gabbard.
The report makes clear that former President Barack Obama and his jackboots henchmen — former Central Intelligence Agency Director John Brennan, former Federal Bureau of Investigation Director James Comey, and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper — force-fabricated a lie about Russian President Vladimir Putin’s supposed “preference” for then-candidate Donald Trump to win the 2016 election.
With direct interference from Brennan and Obama himself, the Obama administration pushed this narrative as a way to undermine the entire Trump 45 presidency, stripping the American people of the leadership they elected in 2016.
“They conspired to subvert the will of the American people, working with their partners in the media to promote the lie, in order to undermine the legitimacy of President Trump, essentially enacting a years-long coup against him,” Gabbard stated. “Obama ordered the Intelligence Community to create an Intelligence Community Assessment they knew was false, promoting a contrived narrative, with the intent of undermining the legitimacy and power of a duly elected President of the United States, Donald Trump.”
In order to manufacture the lie, they produced an Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA). At every turn, Obama’s security state tyrants failed to adhere to any standard of quality whatsoever when pulling together the “intelligence” that would be used to destroy Trump’s first four years in office and hoodwink many Americans into believing that the U.S. president was actually a puppet of Russia.
They did this over the objections of senior intelligence staffers, as well. But, “the ICA was a high-profile product ordered by the President,” the report states, adding, “Production of the ICA was subject to unusual directives from the President and senior political appointees, and particularly DCIA.”
The report released by Gabbard states that the ICA failed to “properly describe quality and credibility of underlying sources”; “properly express and explain uncertainties associated with major analytic judgments”; “base confidence assessments on ‘the quantity and quality of source material’”; “be informed by all relevant information available;”; “consider alternative perspectives and contrary information”; and “be independent of political considerations.”
But the supposed backbone of the report was based on a six-word partial quote described as “one scant, unclear, and unverifiable fragment of a sentence from a single HUMINT [human intelligence] report — published under DCIA Brennan’s December 2016 order.”
The words were “whose victory Putin was counting on.”
The full quote is “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” (bold in original).
The report states that those six words, found between commas in the longer sentence, could not have been properly understood and that “a senior CIA operations officer said of the fragment, ‘We don’t know what was meant by that’ and ‘five people read it five ways.’”
In addition, that entire quote is suspect because it was sourced from a person with a “strong dislike for Putin” and an “anti-Trump bias.” There was also “no other intelligence corroborating it.”
Regardless, including the fragment was paramount to fabricating the narrative.
“The significance of this fragment to the ICA case that Putin ‘aspired’ for candidate Trump to win cannot be overstated. The major ‘high confidence’ judgment of the ICA rests on one opinion about a text fragment with uncertain meaning, that may be a garble, and for which it is not clear how it was obtained,” the report states. “This text — which would not have been published without DCIA’s orders to do so — is cited using only one interpretation of its meaning and without considering alternative interpretations.”
“The report containing the fragment did not directly say or imply that Putin ‘developed a preference for Trump’ nor did it say Putin ordered his intelligence services to ‘assist Trump’s chances of victory when possible,’” it continued.
Nonetheless, those six words “constitute[d] the only classified information cited by the ICA for the judgment that Putin ‘aspired to help Trump’s chances of victory when possible,’” according to the report.
“The ICA did not cite any report where Putin directly indicated helping Trump win was the objective,” the report continued. “That judgment rested on a questionable interpretation of this one unclear fragment of a sentence.”
Questionable interpretation, indeed — particularly in light of some other findings indicating that “Putin’s principal motivations in these operations were to undermine faith in the US democratic process and to weaken what the Russians considered to be an inevitable Clinton presidency,” and that “Putin held back leaking some compromising material for post-election use against the expected Clinton administration.”
CIA officers warned Brennan about the shoddy nature of the sentence fragment and initially omitted the fragment in the report. But Brennan forced the publication anyway, and personally demanded the fragment be included.
One officer said that he and a colleague argued, “‘We don’t have direct information that Putin wanted to get Trump elected’ and therefore the judgment that Putin was counting on Trump’s victory should be removed from the ICA or the ICA should be changed.”
Three human intelligence reports that were force-published by Brennan and became “foundational” in the ICA’s claims that Putin preferred Trump were determined by a “veteran CIA officer” to contain “substandard information that was unclear, of uncertain origin, potentially biased, implausible, or in the words of senior operations officers, ‘odd.’”
According to the report, it is more likely that Putin “counted on” (or, expected) Trump winning the Republican nomination to run for president at the Republican National Convention, not his victory over Clinton in the general election.
“This alternate interpretation would suggest that the fragment says nothing about Putin’s thoughts — positive or negative — of Trump or whether Russia ought to help him win or not,” the report states. “It would not support a judgment that Putin ‘preferred’ Trump, nor one that Putin ‘aspired’ to help him win.”
That potential interpretation of the fragment was omitted entirely from the ICA, which claimed “high confidence” in its interpretation.
“President Obama, former Director of the CIA John Brennan, and others fabricated the Russia Hoax, suppressed intelligence showing Putin was preparing for a Clinton victory, manufactured findings from shoddy sources, disobeyed IC standards, and knowingly lied to the American people,” Gabbard said.
Calling Obama administration activities a “treasonous conspiracy,” Gabbard sent a criminal referral to the Department of Justice.