Jill Stein/ Green Party will be on ballot in Wisconsin

[seminole97]

The novelty in the 2017 case is the use of an intelligence report to launch a domestic political operation, as opposed to a foreign invasion like Iraq. The ICA’s conclusion about Russia’s motives, and its inclusion of an appendix containing material from the controversial “Steele dossier,” became the pretext for four intelligence chiefs – Brennan, Clapper, FBI Director James Comey, and NSA chief Mike Rogers – to brief then-president-elect Trump on its contents.

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However, there’s significant independent verification of the idea that the “Russia favored Trump” conclusion was indeed “cooked.” Former Director Brennan’s own book, Undaunted, describes how he not only overruled NSA director Mike Rogers but “two senior managers for the CIA mission center for Russia,” whom he decided had “not read all the available intelligence.”

It’s well-known that the NSA and Rogers never moved off their conclusion that there was not “sufficient evidence to support a high-confidence judgment that Russia supported Trump,” as Brennan put it. They expressed only “moderate” confidence in the idea.

Less well-remembered is that the FBI and then-director Comey appeared to change their minds. Days before the 2016 election, senior officials told the New York Times that the FBI was not only (correctly) disavowing reports of a “secret channel of email communication” between Trump and Russia’s Alfa Bank, but that “even the hacking into Democratic emails, F.B.I. and intelligence officials now believe, was aimed at disrupting the presidential election rather than electing Mr. Trump.”

In the first week of December, the CIA and FBI each gave secret briefings to the Senate. These presentations appeared to conflict so much on the question of whether or not the interference was to help Trump that the differing accounts were leaked to the Washington Post, which quickly published “FBI and CIA Give Differing Accounts on Russia’s Motives.”

A week later, on December 16th, 2016, the Post published a different story, called “FBI in agreement with CIA that Russia aimed to help Trump,” announcing the FBI's change of mind. Unnamed officials surfaced to explain that lawmakers who felt the FBI and CIA had differing accounts “misunderstood,” telling the paper, “The truth is they were never all that different in the first place.”

When Comey testified in the House and revealed the existence of an investigation into Trump in a blockbuster televised proceeding in March, 2020, he made a point of fixing the date of the FBI’s certainty about Russia’s motives in December 2016, i.e. after the election. This led to a little-noticed confrontation with former Texas Congressman Mike Conaway:

CONAWAY: The conclusion that active measures were taken specifically to help President Trump's campaign, you had that -- by early December, you already had that conclusion?
COMEY: Correct, that they wanted to hurt our democracy, hurt her, help him. I think all three we were confident in, at least as early as December.
CONAWAY: The paragraph that gives me a little concern there… I'm not sure if we went back and got that exact same January assessment six months earlier, it would've looked the same.

 

[seminole97]

In sum, of the three agencies primarily responsible for the ICA, which was compiled in less than four weeks – Obama ordered the review on December 9th, 2016 – the NSA never supported the “high confidence” conclusion, the FBI appeared to change its mind, and two of Brennan’s own CIA analysts disagreed with the conclusion. In the end, the conclusion rested almost entirely on Brennan’s own judgment. Sources believe Brennan relied a great deal on one human asset, allegedly in Russia, who allegedly had access to the very desk of Vladimir Putin and was publicly described as “instrumental” to the CIA’s judgment on Russia’s motives.

This “highest level source for the US inside the Kremlin” was deemed so important that a high-level operation was apparently executed to “exfiltrate” him from Russia, reportedly – the story was leaked to CNN, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and others – out of fears for his life. The official was later identified by the Russian newspaper Kommersant as a mid-level diplomat named Oleg Smolenkov and was so frightened for his safety he bought a house under his own name in Stafford, Virginia, the news reaching the world via Realtor.com.

The “Intelligence Community Assessment” is a relatively new product in the arsenal of the intelligence agencies. The old standard used to be the National Intelligence Estimate, used throughout the Cold War, often to inform Congress about national security trends. The NIE became a statutory responsibility of the National Intelligence Council (NIC) when the latter was created in 1979. NIEs looked “three to five years out,” as the former CIA official put it. A shorter paper called the Special National Intelligence Assessment, or SNIE, was created to fill demand for a more agile product looking 1-2 years into the future. Shorter still was the Intelligence Community Brief, or ICB, a six-page report with a quick turnaround that became more popular after 9/11.

The ICA rests between a SNIE and an ICB, a report of 20-30 pages that is supposed to comprise views of analysts from multiple agencies and “noting any disagreements in analytic judgements,” as the Congressional Research Service once wrote in a memo to Senator Dianne Feinstein. Disagreements do not appear to have been noted in this case.

Virtually every major contention of the original Russiagate probe has now been debunked, from the notion that the Trump campaign had a secret “back channel” to the Kremlin in 2016, to the idea that a Trump aide was an “agent of a foreign power,” to accusations of “collusion” with the GRU or Russian hackers. Even the idea of election “interference” in 2016 was largely a press fiction. As noted in the Columbia Journalism Review opus about the Trump-Russia scandal by Jeff Gerth, reporters from papers like the New York Times used phrases like “the most effective foreign interference in an American election in history,” and even the Pulitzer Committee commended prize-winning Times and Post reporters for their coverage of “Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and its connection to the Trump campaign.”

Not even Brennan’s team ever used the term “interference.” “Influence campaign” was as far as they went, and no connection between the Trump campaign and “influence” activities was ever established.

There are still large segments of the population that believe there was a Russian campaign to help Trump and avoid a Clinton presidency. If there’s any proof that this conclusion is true, Republicans and Democrats alike should be demanding its release. Figures like Brennan, Comey, and James Clapper should especially be pounding a table to get that data out.

Absent such evidence, the HPSCI report — especially considered in light of all the surrounding evidence that dissent was suppressed — should allow us to consider that myth exploded. The still-blocked raw research needs to come out, however. In an election year in which the question of who violated norms first is paramount, voters need to see everything.

“It will come down to the documents,” is how one source put it. “The public needs to see them all.”