The hoopla surrounding ODNI Tulsi Gabbard’s release of two tranches of Russiagate documents (here and here) can be overwhelming even to those of us who are deep in the weeds on this thing. It doesn’t help that the entire Democrat Media Complex is singing from the same “oh this is old news” songbook.
It’s not old news.
“Ok, Annie. So explain it to us, ya big smarty-pants!”
Alrighty-then! Happily, I do not need to do it myself! Someone way smarter than me has done it. Fox News’ Gregg Jarrett, who thinks like a lawyer because he is one, has done it with the clarity of an attorney accustomed to making the complex easy to understand in small digestible bites. Here are the opening paragraphs which cut to the heart of it from his excellent piece at Fox’s website.
The Big Lie was that then-candidate Donald Trump colluded with Russia to rig the 2016 presidential election. It derived from a phony dossier commissioned and financed by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton that Obama’s national security team happily peddled to destroy his successor.
What did Tulsi reveal about this “old news”? That the entirety of John Brennan’s analysts at CIA and of the agents at Jim Comey’s FBI thought the dossier lacked proper “tradecraft” and was little better than “the National Enquirer.” None of them thought it merited inclusion in any finished intelligence product and what Tulsi brought that was new was documentary proof that Brennan knew this then sidelined all the dissenting voices.
It begat an even bigger whopper that “Putin and the Russian Government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump” and “aspired to help” his election chances. This notorious deceit was inserted in the official Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) that was ordered by Obama himself and conjured up by his CIA Director John Brennan.
What did Tulsi reveal about this “old news”? That the Russians had dirt on Hillary that, had they truly wanted to help Trump, they would’ve used prior to Election Day November 8th of 2016 — but they didn’t. They held it back, presumably to blackmail her once she became president. Tulsi had quotes from the documents that Hillary was psychologically unstable and on tranquilizers. If Trump truly had “colluded” with the Russians to win, it makes absolutely no sense that the Russians were suddenly feeling generous towards Hillary!
He goes on:
The bogus dossier was exploited to justify the ICA. Conversely, the ICA was used to legitimize the dossier. The circular faux verification was a clever ruse. And it worked splendidly. When both documents were leaked to the gullible Trump-hating media, journalists adopted them without question as sacred gospel from the Holy Book of Obama. The Russia hoax took off like a rocket.
It crash-landed on Wednesday, July 23, when Tulsi Gabbard, the director of National Intelligence, accused Obama, Brennan and others of engineering the false intelligence. “They knew it would promote this contrived narrative that Russia interfered in the 2016 election to help President Trump win, selling it to the American people as though it were true. It wasn’t,” she added.
Newly declassified documents show that a December 8, 2016, draft of Obama’s Presidential Daily Briefing (PDB) debunked the notion of Russian electoral meddling to help Trump. But wait … that was problematic because it did not conform to the preferred narrative of Trump-Russia collusion. So, FBI Director James Comey and his cohorts reportedly scuttled it. That way, Trump, as president-elect, could not be briefed on its contents.
The next day Obama convened a highly confidential meeting at the White House. The president ordered his intelligence cronies to expedite a new ICA that would reverse the PDB’s conclusion and energize the collusion fiction. With his marching orders in hand, Brennan immediately went to work on it.
His challenge was devising a way to contort the known evidence and contradict the consensus of nearly everyone else in the intelligence community. No problem. CIA experts on Russia who strenuously objected were sidelined and silenced. Brennan ignored their warning that there was no direct evidence that Russian President Vladimir Putin wanted to elect Trump.
Other intel agencies that typically contribute to the assessment were deliberately excluded to stifle dissent. Evidence shows that Brennan then selected a handful of sycophants — with only one principal drafter — to craft the entire ICA that bore little resemblance to the truth and established facts.
On January 6, 2017, the rushed-to-completion ICA was produced. It offered a remarkable transformation from the earlier PDB: “Putin and the Russian Government aspired to help President-Elect Trump’s election chances when possible by discrediting Secretary Clinton and publicly contrasting her unfavorably to him.” (Page 7 of ICA)
The head-spinning about-face of intel conclusions was an immaculate conception of corrupt handicraft that belongs in the Intelligence Hall of Shame.
Although Brennan denied it, numerous delusions drawn from the fake dossier were placed in the formal intelligence assessment to give it the sustenance that it otherwise lacked. Armed with both fallacious documents, Comey then met with Trump later that day in a devious but misbegotten scheme to entrap him. It failed miserably because the newly elected president had no idea what the FBI director was talking about.
Obama’s dirty fingerprints were all over the cooked-up intelligence claiming that Moscow helped Trump in some grand collusion conspiracy. On Wednesday, Gabbard held a news conference to lift the veil of secrecy and malevolence. She leveled the following broadside:
You’ll have to read the entire piece to see the “broadside.” I’ve quoted quite enough!