Mollie Hemingway Exclusive: Top Career Intelligence Officials Objected to Brennan's Partisan Russiagate Claim, Brennan Overruled Them

But wait: I thought we were supposed to defer to the nonpartisan career bureaucrats' judgments...?

It gets worse: Brennan testified to Congress that the Russiagate claim that "Russia tried to get Trump elected" was backed by analysis with a "high level of confidence."

But there wasn't. In fact, senior intelligence officials doubted his claim.

He lied. This was his personal politicized assessment, and never had "high confidence" by anyone other than himself and the Obama Regime coup ringleaders.

Top officials working on an intelligence community analysis about Russia's interference in the 2016 election were overruled by CIA Director John Brennan, according to records exclusively reviewed by The Federalist. The records are related to ongoing criminal investigations into Brennan and other top intelligence officials for their roles in launching the Russia collusion hoax.

The dispute was over the "key judgment" in a January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) that Russia had interfered in the election specifically because Putin and the Russian government "aspired to help President-elect Trump's election chances."

The senior intelligence officials pointed out the lack of evidence to substantiate the claim. "We have no intelligence to directly support this 'aspiration' point," said one member of the small group of individuals working with Brennan, FBI Director James Comey, and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper on the assessment of Russian activity in the lead-up to the 2016 election.

The official worried that the inclusion of the claim would "open the IC to a line of very politicized inquiry that is sure to come up when this paper is shared with the Hill." A recent CIA analysis of the inclusion of this disputed "key judgment" noted the risks of including poorly supported judgments since skeptical readers are inclined to "reject an entire analysis if a single judgment appears exaggerated, biased, or unsupported."

The experts did not disagree that Russia had continued its practice of attempting to sow chaos in presidential elections. They believed the intelligence indicated Russia sought to weaken presumptive winner Hillary Clinton and those efforts may have indirectly helped Trump. But they were concerned about the lack of evidence for the claim that became a cornerstone of the Russia collusion narrative, in which Trump was accused of conspiring with Russia to steal the 2016 election.

"Can you really prove Moscow was trying to get Trump elected?" the official asked in late December 2016.

Brennan called the dissenting individuals into his office on Dec. 30, 2016, and had a lengthy meeting in which they articulated their serious concerns. "The assessment will stay the same," Brennan reported at the end of the meeting.

The paper trail about this dispute posed a problem for Brennan, who had presented the information as being universally held with a high degree of confidence. The CIA review noted that the key judgment was given a "higher confidence level than was justified." It further noted the ICA had been drafted under an unusually rushed timeline, had been preceded by leaks to The Washington Post and New York Times improperly claiming "definitive conclusions" had already been reached, and had indications of a "potential political motive."

Much like Adam Schiff, Brennan would later claim he had seen Secret Intelligence that no one else saw, and which has never been presented to anyone else, that justified his claims.

Brennan has never publicly shared what his secret knowledge was that led him to make the claim that Russia sought to help Trump, although it had purportedly been collected in July and first disseminated on Dec. 19, to supposedly support the ICA's conclusion that Russia wanted to elect Trump. But even then, Brennan "tightly restricted access to this information." The CIA review of the ICA questioned "whether the extreme limitations on access to underlying intelligence within the IC during the ICA's preparation was justifiable," given that following its release, the highest classified version of the ICA was shopped around to literally hundreds of U.S. officials.

Read the whole thing.

Matt Taibbi has a related report. The intelligence professionals reported that Russia had not hacked the actual vote. They concluded that Russia lacked both the intent and even the capability of "hacking the election" -- an allegation the drunken harridan Hillary Clinton was making.

But Brennan stripped this out of the presidential daily briefing.

Taibbi thinks he knows why: Because Trump, as president-elect, would have read it. He was entitled to read the presidential daily briefs as president-elect, and if the real intelligence had been in the PBD, he would have seen it and used that conclusion to refute the fictional "Russia hacked the election" psyop.

Again, this was no fringe conspiracy theory, as Democrats are claiming now, to downplay the importance of Brennan's deception: Hillary Clinton was giving speeches claiming that Russia literally "hacked the election."

One is a crucial fact left out of Saturday's Racket article on the DNI releases. Had the intelligence community gone forward with a Presidential Daily Briefing that said Russia had not attacked infrastructure in a way "intended to alter results," it would have been seen by a key audience: Donald Trump. Presidents-elect are entitled to read Presidential Daily Briefings. During the transition, Trump's National Security Adviser Michael Flynn was already being read in, and would have seen the planned December 9th text downplaying Russian interference.

"I would have seen it," Flynn says now. "I was reading the PDBs at that point." Asked yesterday if he thought that might have been a reason for holding the planned draft, Flynn said, "Very likely."

Second, the notion that Russia interfered with actual vote tallies was no fringe conspiracy theory then. It was widely believed by Democratic voters. This was almost certainly a consequence of a two stage process that began with the flood of news stories based on leaks from intelligence sources beginning on December 9th, 2016. These not only alleged Russia interfered to help Donald Trump in an aburpt about-face from pre-election stories, but focused heavily on Russian hacking.

Within a week -- by December 16th, 2016 -- Hillary Clinton was publicly calling the election "unfair, not free, illegitimate," adding, "Vladimir Putin himself directed the covert cyberattacks against our electoral system, against our democracy, apparently because he has a personal beef against me." The New York Times ran the audio:

See the article for Hillary Clinton claiming, WITHOUT EVIDENCE, that Russia "hacked the election."

Longtime readers may remember that I asked on Twitter why CNN wasn't knocking down this WITHOUT EVIDENCE conspiracy theory, and Jake Tapper slid in my DMs to say: "Cite?" And I told him: It was literally on your show five minutes ago, presented in a pre-recorded package that you obviously did not bother watching or listening to. Tapper apparently blows off watching his own show to immediately rush to Twitter to patrol for any negative mentions of himself or CNN.

An Economist/YouGov survey taken immediately after these remarks, on December 17th-20th, 2016, showed 50% of Clinton's voters believed Russia "tampered with vote tallies":

So the feral lesbian alcoholic Hillary Clinton was spreading this false WITHOUT EVIDENCE claim and Obama was meanwhile stripping out the consensus nonpartisan career intelligence officials' assessment that this conspiracy theory was simply not true. And they stripped out that intelligence to deprive Trump of the ability to refute the drunken gassy sow's WITHOUT EVIDENCE conspiracy theories.

Meanwhile Jake Tapper is also blowing off Hillary Clinton's attack on The Very Pillars of Our Sacred Democracy, to obsessively scan Twitter to make sure that no one in the world has any criticisms of him.

Obama pushed Hillary Clinton's false claims to the public as well.

In addition to the disinformation ICA he directed at Congress and the public, Obama directly lied to Americans in speeches about Russian election interference. For example, on Dec. 16, 2016, Obama stated he was "concerned about ... potential hacking that could hamper vote counting and affect the actual election process itself. And so in early September, when I saw President Putin in China, I felt that the most effective way to ensure that, that didn't happen was to talk to him directly. And tell him to cut it out."

At that time, however, Obama had to know U.S. intelligence agencies had assessed that statement to be false, because his staff had prevented the publication of an earlier intelligence assessment saying so, the newly released documents show. This also means the same people and agencies that erected a totalitarian censorship edifice under the pretext of "misinformation" and "disinformation" were in fact the top sources of widely believed misinformation and disinformation that have now affected at least three U.S. presidential elections.

Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama exchanged emails to coordinate the WITHOUT EVIDENCE psyop.

There's now mounting evidence -- texts, emails, and corroborating testimony -- that senior Obama officials and Clinton campaign aides knew the Russian "interference" narrative was bogus yet pushed it anyway as a calculated smear campaign to protect their political power. According to reporting by Paul Sperry at Real Clear Investigations, damning communications reveal direct coordination between Clinton operatives and top figures across the Obama administration, including the White House, National Security Council, State Department, and intelligence agencies. The fix wasn't just suspected; it was orchestrated from the very beginning.

Paul Sperry @paulsperry_

DEVELOPING: I'm told there are texts/emails indicating Hillary Clinton campaign aides directly coordinated with the Obama White House, NSC, State Dept and Intelligence Community officials in efforts to dig up dirt tying Donald Trump to Vladimir Putin in July 2016 ...developing...

And finally: Don't forget that Comey was in such a mad rush to exonerate Hillary Clinton for stealing gigabytes of top secret US documents that he didn't even bother to examine thumbdrives containing the documents.

A newly-declassified appendix to a years-old Justice Department watchdog report shows that then-FBI Director James Comey was swayed to preemptively announce the end of the bureau's investigation into Hillary Clinton based on mysterious classified intelligence reports -- and that the FBI failed to investigate thumbdrives containing potentially key information about use of an illicit private email server.

The details are part of a classified appendix to DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz's 2018 report criticizing the politicized conduct of the FBI's Midyear Exam investigation into Clinton's mishandling of classified information through the use of a private server while she was secretary of state.

Comey unilaterally announced in a July 2016 speech -- about four months before Election Day for the Democratic presidential nomine -- the investigation had been concluded with charges being brought against her.

At about the same time, the FBI formally launched its Crossfire Hurricane investigation into claims that the campaign for the GOP presidential nominee, Donald Trump, was colluding with Russia to influence the outcome of the election.

"This document shows an extreme lack of effort and due diligence in the FBI's investigation of former Secretary Clinton's email usage and mishandling of highly classified information," Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, said Monday as he released the classified appendix to the DOJ watchdog report.

posted by Ace at 01:21 PM

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