CIA “Cooked The Intelligence” To Hide That Russia Favored Clinton, Not Trump In 2016, Sources Say

by Matt Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger, and Alex Gutentag

It was all a lie.

The Trump-Russia scandal made its formal launch on January 6^th, 2017, when the office of the Director of National Intelligence James Clapper published what’s called an “Intelligence Community Assessment,” or “ICA,” as it’s universally known in Washington.

Release of the ICA dominated headlines, fixed Donald Trump in the minds of millions of Americans as a Manchurian candidate controlled by Vladamir Putin, and upended his in-coming administration.

The report declared that Russia and Putin interfered in the 2016 presidential election to “denigrate” Hillary Clinton and “harm her electability,” thanks to their “clear preference for President-elect [Donald] Trump.”

It was powerful stuff. And it was dead wrong.

“They cooked the intelligence,” says a source close to a House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) investigation into the origins of the Trump-Russia scandal, whose full findings are being blocked from release. “They made it look like Putin supported Trump,” the source added. “The evidence points the other way.”

Former CIA Director John Brennan and the ICA authors “embellished” their conclusion by upgrading unreliable sources to reliable, the source said. “They upgraded in the writing of their report to let those sources have more credibility and a higher rating. We caught them on 3-4 items where those people didn’t have a credible historic reporting line and changed the source rating for that Brennan report.”

Dissent, even within Brennan’s group of 24 “hand-picked” analysts — not from 17 agencies but just four, and really just three, when one considers the ODNI is just a coordinating agency — was overruled.

The House investigators, who worked out of a “small room in Langley” and had broad access to classified documentation and witnesses from the CIA and other agencies, found U.S. intelligence analysts had “a lot of stuff about the Russians calling Trump ‘mercurial,’ ‘unreliable,’ and ‘not steady.’”

On the other hand, Russians apparently saw Hillary as “manageable and reflecting continuity. It was a relationship they were comfortable with….there was no real evidence that Russia supported Trump. They were trying to make this bizarre case.”

The effort to manufacture the Intelligence Community claim that Russians had a “clear preference” for Trump was led by CIA Director Brennan, whom sources also implicate in an unprecedented effort to place more than two dozen Trump aides and associates under surveillance prior to the election.

“We looked at the report and the sourcing they used to evaluate the sourcing, and then we dug further to look at the data available to them that they didn’t use, and it overwhelmingly contradicted their conclusions that Russia supported Trump.”

As Public and Racket reported earlier this week, U.S. intel leaders coaxed foreign allies, particularly from so-called “Five Eyes” security partners like the United Kingdom, into “making contacts and bumping” Trump associates throughout 2016.

A crucial conclusion of the House investigators was that both the surveillance campaign and the rapidly assembled ICA were conducted for political reasons. This was not a national security investigation that turned political. It began as a political enterprise.

“They thought they could damage Trump,” the source said. “It had nothing to do with our relationship with Russia. It was just leveraging capabilities to undermine this rookie unprepared Trump campaign because they were easy marks.”

The story of a highly influential whitewashed intelligence product whose true conclusions only became known later is, of course, not new. This also happened in the weapons of mass destruction (WMD) affair, when a politically charged intelligence report concluded that Saddam Hussein was intent on pursuing nuclear weapons, in order to justify the 2003 US invasion of Iraq.

None of the information shared with Public and Racket has been reported until now.

Birth Of An Intelligence Scandal

Of the three agencies primarily responsible for the ICA, which was compiled in less than four weeks – Obama ordered the review on December 9^th, 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

The information obtained by Public and Racket is based on information from three sources close to the HPSCI investigation, who described reports and internal documentation assiduously kept from the public for years.

Though gathered by Republican-appointed investigators, the data came from the U.S. intelligence community’s own records of the Trump-Russia investigation, just like another probe conducted by the same office that has already been proven true:the FISA abuse investigation.

At the time of Trump’s inauguration, the House Intelligence Committee was chaired by California Republican Devin Nunes, who launched an inquiry into the Trump-Russia investigation in March of 2017. Within a year, this HPSCI team put out an initial “Nunes memo” describing FBI malfeasance in obtaining secret FISA surveillance on Trump figures like former aide Carter Page in the 2016 campaign.

Though universally denounced by Democratic officials and media figures at the time of its publication in February, 2018, the Nunes memo would be vindicated a year later by a scathing report on the same FISA abuses by Barack Obama’s appointee to Inspector General of the Justice Department, Michael Horowitz.

The Nunes memo dealt a blow to the credibility of the Trump-Russia investigation and the infamous “Steele Dossier” reports, compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele and paid for by Hillary Clinton’s campaign firm, Perkins Coie.

But it turns out that the 2018 memo only represented a small share of the HPSCI team’s work. Intelligence officials in both the Trump and Biden administrations, it turns out, blocked the release of other conclusions including a “3,000 hour” investigation into the creation of Brennan’s Intelligence Community Assessment, which have been in a “vault in the CIA” since 2018.

“We had two teams,” says former Principal Deputy to the Acting Director of National Intelligence Kash Patel. “There was the larger team back at the ranch at [HPSCI] headquarters, doing our thing with the depositions and fighting DOJ. Then we had a couple of IC subject matter folks who were reviewing everything that happened, specific to the ICA that Brennan had authorized.”

The smaller group of “IC subject matter folks” worked out of that small office at CIA headquarters, with “ingress and egress” strictly controlled by the Agency. This unit’s work on Brennan’s Assessment resulted in a report of “about 18 pages,” written by four primary authors. The team also contributed materials that ended up in a binder that Trump tried to declassify in a frantic struggle in the waning days of his administration.

Patel, two years ago, told RealClearInvestigations that the release of this report describing “significant intelligence tradecraft failings” was blocked by former CIA director Gina Haspel, who played a significant part in this story, as we noted yesterday. Haspel was CIA station chief in London in the summer of 2016, and the FBI could not open its “Crossfire Hurricane” probe of Trump in the U.K. without her help.

“If the FBI wants to go overseas, they have to get permission from the host nation,” says Patel. “And way you do that is through the intelligence community.”

Haspel became CIA Director in the summer of 2018.

Cooking The Intelligence

The information Public and Racket received squares with a report from a little-noticed interview of FBI Special Agent William Barnett, who was part of both the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane probe and the subsequent Special Counsel investigation led by Robert Mueller.

Barnett on September 21, 2020 told investigators in a different review that the initial belief that the Trump campaign was “penetrated by Russians” was “opaque,” a case theory based on “supposition after supposition.” He described a lack of predication and a “get Trump” attitude among investigators, who were guided by what he called “astro projection,” which led them from dead end to dead end in an Ahab-like search for an elusive “quid pro quo.”

The “Intelligence Community Assessment” is a relatively new type of report in the arsenal of the intelligence agencies. The old standard used to be the National Intelligence Estimate, a tool used throughout the Cold War, often to inform congress about national security trends, that 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.

But not even Brennan’s team ever used the term “interference.” “Influence campaign” was as far as they went, and no connection to the Trump campaign was ever established.

When told about how the IC had kept out of the ICA intelligence showing the Russians favored Clinton over Trump, a former senior CIA official l said it “might not be” a sin, as the absence of a reporting line isn’t the same thing as the presence of negative information. You have to have “some flexibility… to tinker.”

But, the same former official said itcould be a “mortal sin,” as it was in the the case of the WMD in Iraq.Back then, the CIA withheld negative information about the infamous “Curveball” source, Rafid Ahmad Alwan

This allowed officials like then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to maintain the U.S. had “bulletproof” evidence of Iraq’s links to al-Qaeda. Not until 2015 – a dozen years after the fact – would it become known that the report said there was “no operational tie” between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda.

Multiple sources said Brennan’s exclusion of the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence Research (INR) were and are red flags pointing to a manipulated conclusion.

“The real story is that Brennan and Clapper succeeded in marginalizing both the State Department and the DIA, which has primary responsibility for the GRU,” says former CIA official Ray McGovern.

Former Russian ambassador to Moscow Jack Matlock in 2018 described being told by a “Senior official” that “the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence Research did, in fact, have a different opinion but was not allowed to express it.”

“State and defense are the two big players,” agrees another former diplomat with a connection to the case. The CIA in recent times has occasionally kept State out of the loop out of concerns about leaks, but to keep out the DIA was “crazy,” the source said.

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 annex 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.

Comey stayed after the main briefing to inform Trump about the so-called “derog files” about Trump’s alleged escapades with prostitutes, reassuring Trump that “it was important that we not give [the press] the excuse to write that the FBI has the material,” promising to keep the report “close-hold.”

Within four days – by January 10^th – the information about these meetings leaked and was published by CNN, which in turn led to the publication of the entire Steele dossier by Buzzfeed. This triggered a protracted campaign of illegal leaks and politicized investigations, with Comey announcing in March of 2017 that the FBI was conducting an investigation into Russian “efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election,” including “any links between individuals associated with the Trump campaign.”

Comey did not tell the public at the moment of this sensational announcement that the FBI probe had begun the previous summer and so far failed to turn up evidence of coordination, or that internal doubts had already been raised about key sources. This in turn led to the opening of the Mueller probe, which dominated the Trump administration’s first two and a half years before coming up empty.

All of this started with the ICA, which we now know was, like the Iraq document, manufactured intelligence.

“The ICA was the first big lie,” says former Defense Intelligence Agency head and Trump’s would-be National Security Director, Michael Flynn.

Bad Intel

Not everyone felt the construction of the ICA was as serious or as controversial as the HPSCI investigators. One former senior CIA official contacted for this story said, “This is the same dead horse they’re going to keep beating forever,” the official said.

A bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee investigation also reviewed the ICA in a 158-page report released in 2020 and pronounced it a “sound intelligence product.”

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 changed 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 in 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 16^th, 2016, the Post published a different story, called “FBI in agreement with CIA that Russia aimed to help Trump,” announcing the FBI 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.

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.

There are still large segments of the population, however, 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, figures like Brennan, Comey, and James Clapper should be pounding a table to demand its release.

Absent such evidence, the HPSCI report describing the opposite should allow us to consider that myth exploded, but the still-blocked raw research needs to come out. 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.”

LINK