By Greg Collard of Racket News
A key part of the House Permanent Selection Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) review is about then-CIA director John Brennan’s reliance on an obscure fragment to determine in the 2017 ICA that Putin “aspired to help Trump’s chances of victory when possible.”
The fragment, which is in bold below, comes from a raw human source intelligence report, or HUMINT in intelligence-speak.
“Putin had made this decision [to leak DNC emails) after he had come to believe t h a t 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.”
You might think that means Putin wanted Trump to win. That’s one interpretation.
But there were five different interpretations among the five people who wrote the ICA.
A senior CIA operations officers remarked: “We don’t know what was meant by that,” and “five people read it five ways,” the HPSCI reports says.
Usually that’s no problem, because as the Intelligence Community Directive standards (ICD 203) make clear, alternative interpretations should be included. Incredibly, the ICA failed to do that even though there was great disagreement on the fragment’s meaning.
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. 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 HPSCI gives some examples of alternative interpretations for “whose victory Putin was counting on.” Since the information was acquired in July 2016, it could have meant Putin “expected” a Trump victory at the upcoming Republican National Convention. The HPSCI notes that the convention’s outcome “was still uncertain to do active efforts to deny Trump a majority of convention delegates. This was a headline issue for the US political media at the time, though many pundits nonetheless expected — or ‘counted on’ — a Trump victory.”
I encourage you to read the declassified HPSCI report for yourself. In the meantime, some other findings from the report are listed below. There are enough findings that make clear the ICA reeks to make even a roach turn away. Unfortunately, too many pols in the Adam Schiff mold have lower standards.
The ICA report says, “We assess that Russian leaders never entirely abandoned hope for a defeat of Secretary Clinton.” However, the intelligences the ICA cites to make that conclusion report does not say that. The raw intelligence, the HPSCI report says:
Does not state— not does it infer—that Russian leaders "never abandoned hope" for defeating Clinton, nor does it even use the word "hope" or similar phrasing.
Does not in any way describe the aspirations, plans or intentions of Putin or other Russian leaders.
Does not describe Putin's "aspiration to help Trump's chances of victory" nor does it propose contrasting Clinton unfavorably to Trump.
The HPSCI report says that “Putin's decision not to leak additional derogatory information on Secretary Clinton as the polls narrowed undermine the ICA's claim that he ‘aspired’ to help Trump win and “never entirely abandoned hope for a defeat of Secretary Clinton.”
Racket has asked Clinton to comment on the below “derogatory information” that SVR compiled. We haven’t heard back from her office. It’s important to clarify the assertions about Clinton may be important without being true. Even if it was bad intelligence, it existed, and the ICA chose not to include it. Meanwhile, it ignored the multitude of problems with the intelligence relied on to denigrate Trump.
The HPSCI report says the “generic description of the material Putin held back makes the reader unaware of significant information available to Moscow to denigrate Secretary Clinton. This violated ICD 203 directives that analysis ‘be informed by all relevant information available’ given that documents leaked during the election were far less damaging to Secretary Clinton than those Putin chose not to leak.” Examples of the derogatory information held back:
This list is far from complete, as you’ll see from the HPSCI report listed below and Matt’s story, “In Brutal Disclosure, Russia Hoax Finally Revealed.”
Many of these findings will come as no surprise to a lot of people, although it might be still be eye-opening to them and maybe others who haven’t reached a conclusion on the merits of the ICA. For sure, there will also be people who remain convinced that nothing untoward occurred. Nonetheless, it appears the highest levels of government during the final days of the Obama administration orchestrated a deception designed to deceive us all.
Here is the full Oversight Investigation and Referral