Note on New Trump-Russia Disclosures

Thanks to explosive new document releases, the Russiagate hoax is now exposed, commencing a new era that will be about accountability for the guilty

As has been rumored all week, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard began releasing documents this afternoon related to intelligence community shenanigans committed in the waning days of Barack Obama’s presidency, before and after the 2016 presidential election. It’s damning stuff that exposes the Trump-Russia hysteria as a complete and utter fake, and should obliterate the reputation of the commercial news media. There is no answer to these documents.

To take one example, intelligence officials on December 8th, 2016 were prepared to release a Presidential Daily Briefing concluding that “Russian and criminal actors did not impact recent US election results by conducting malicious cyber activities against election infrastructure”:

That “did not impact” memo — exactly the opposite of what the Obama White House would claim a month later — never reached the public, thanks to the intervention of a senior official in Director of National Intelligence James Clapper’s office:

On the following day, December 9th, 2016, members of Obama’s National Security Principals Committee — including Clapper, CIA director John Brennan, Susan Rice, John Kerry, Brian McKeon, Loretta Lynch, Andrew McCabe, and Avril Haines — gathered for a meeting, after which each received an email titled, “POTUS Tasking on Russia Election Meddling.” The email tasked the members with the creation of a new “assessment per the President’s request.”

From that moment forward, intelligence officials began leaking “blatantly false” information about a nonexistent “secret assessment” that Russia intervened to influence the “outcome of the election.” This leaking continued unabated until January 6th, when a new, hastily-crafted Intelligence Community Assessment was released, triggering a series of developments that led to the publication of the Steele Dossier and an explosion of media stories linking Trump and Russia in an unprecedented scandal.

The material is bolstered throughout by explanations of a whistleblower from then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper’s office. Just this handful of documents holds explosive implications, implicating a much bigger pool of White House officials than previously understood, including Obama himself, in what appears to be a top-down effort to create a false narrative about Russia meddling to help Donald Trump. If there’s an analog in American history, I can’t think of it.

This is a major action taken by Tulsi Gabbard, whose office was earlier reported by Paul Sperry of RealClear Investigations to have hosted an “urgent” meeting in a secure facility last Sunday. They met to discuss “new Russiagate information” with Trump’s Presidential Intelligence Advisory Board as well as officials from the Department of Justice. With this material, she and the rest of this team are taking on a long list of powerful predecessors, and it’s expected she’ll be made the focus of an all-out negative publicity campaign. “Will be a wild ride,” is how one source put it tonight.

More material is coming. I was working on a different part of this story, about plans for possible charges, when these documents came out this afternoon, so I’ve had to start over. More will be out beginning in the morning. It’s a fascinating moment, and we’ll make sure Racket readers are kept in the loop as new material comes out. Have a good night, everyone.