In Brutal Document Release, the Russia Hoax is Finally Exposed

Official claim that Putin "aspired" to help Trump was based on four pieces of evidence, all bogus, even "ridiculous," according to long-suppressed report just released by DNI Tulsi Gabbard

Confronted with the Steele Dossier’s flaws, CIA Director John Brennan reportedly said, “Yes, but doesn’t it ring true?”

It was worse than we thought.

The January 6, 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment concluding that Russian President Vladimir Putin “developed a clear preference” for Donald Trump and “aspired to help his chances of victory” is revealed in a report released this morning by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard to have been based on four pieces of evidence. One was the Steele Dossier. The surprise is that the other three were even less credible, each included over objections of the report’s CIA authors.

The first item was a “scant, unclear, and unverifiable fragment” of one sentence that the report’s five CIA authors read “five ways” and initially left out, only to have Director John Brennan order it back in. The second item was an email with “no date, no identified sender, no clear recipient, and no classification.” The third was supposedly backed by “liaison,” diplomatic, and press reporting, as well as signals intelligence (SIGINT), except the “SIGINT” didn’t mention Trump, the “liaison reporting” didn’t mention Trump and was from 2014, and the “diplomatic and media” reporting was a post-election review by a U.S. Ambassador citing a Russian pundit who said Putin and Trump should “work together like businessmen.” This was “evidence” that Putin “developed a clear preference” for Trump.

All three reports weren’t just unsourced and unreliable, but discarded fictions pulled out of the CIA’s trash heap. “They manipulated the manipulations,” is how ODNI Deputy Chief of Staff Alexa Henning put it.

The Assessment was written by just five CIA analysts hand-picked by Brennan, but even these most favored lieutenants couldn’t accept the key pieces of evidence. Two of the five went to Brennan to say, “We don’t have direct information that Putin wanted to get Trump elected,” only to be overruled. The same thing happened when members of the group objected to the Steele material, saying it didn’t meet even “basic tradecraft standards.” When confronted on this point, Brennan reportedly said, “Yes, but doesn’t it ring true?”

KILL SHOT: John Brennan, apprised of the Steele dossier’s evidentiary failings, reportedly said, “Yes, but doesn’t it ring true?”

Similarly, when FBI agents tasked with preparing source material were asked about use of the Steele reports, one replied, “Our instructions were that anything we had was to be used,” and that “We were to push this.” The analyst added, about the Steele material, that FBI leadership had decided it was “the right thing to do,” but “we were not able to verify it.” Use of the dossier was debated but ultimately insisted upon by Brennan and FBI Director James Comey, who wrote, “I thought it very important that it be included.”

The information comes from a secret review conducted by a team of House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) investigators who worked “mostly at CIA Headquarters” and “spent over 2,300 hours reviewing the ICA and its source reports,” confirming what Racket and Public reported last year. A long list of other reporters, from Lee Smith to Aaron Maté to Paul Sperry to Ray McGovern to Margot Cleveland of The Federalist to Glenn Greenwald and the Internet sleuthing group “The Corner,” previously reported on the existence of this HPSCI report, which has been “locked in a vault” and “held hostage” at Langley since 2018, as current HPSCI chair Rick Crawford put it. Only after Donald Trump interceded in early July was this report returned to the Hill, and Gabbard’s ODNI has been working to declassify it ever since.

“The most egregious weaponization and politicization of intelligence in American history,” is how Gabbard described it today.

“Amazing,” is how former Judiciary Committee Chief Counsel Jason Foster describes the report. “It takes apart the ICA piece by piece.”

A staffer from the House intelligence Committee under Devin Nunes, who assigned the report in question, commented: “You don’t have to read much past the first page before it becomes crystal clear why the IC spent years trying to bury this report.”

Details about the poverty of the primary evidence linking Putin to Trump were not the only shock in the report. There were many, many more: