CIA tries to spin "Russiagate" treason
The fabricated hit job against Trump's first term was no "procedural anomaly"
On Wednesday, CIA Director John Ratcliffe released a slightly redacted report (“tradecraft review”) of the infamous “Intelligence Community Assessment” (ICA) dated 30 December 2016, and titled Russia's Influence Campaign Targeting the 2016 US Presidential Election.
His comment was that “Agency heads at the time created a politically charged environment that triggered an atypical analytic process around an issue essential to our democracy,” and he vowed that CIA will “deliver unvarnished assessments that are free from political influence.”
The review itself is a pretty sterile bit of Washington posterior-covering. It identifies “multiple procedural anomalies” in the preparation of the ICA, “such as a compressed timeline, uneven access to compartmented information, marginalization of the National Intelligence Council, and excessive involvement of agency heads.”
Translated from bureaucratese: it was rushed, people involved didn’t know what they were talking about, and the whole thing was run by James Clapper (ODNI), John Brennan (CIA) and James Comey (FBI), not the full “intelligence community” as the lying media kept insisting at the time.
In fact, the review specifically points out that Brennan and Comey insisted on including the infamous (entirely fabricated, bought and paid for by Hillary Clinton) “Steele Dossier” alleging Donald Trump’s (entirely nonexistent) ties to Russia; as well as shows Brennan dismissing concerns about something that has been redacted.
The CIA has thus admitted that the whole thing was rotten from the start, and politically motivated to boot. Except that should have been obvious — and to some, it was — simply because of what was in it. Judge for yourself!
The ICA was made public in January 2017, shortly after Comey “warned” Trump of the “dossier”. Here are some quotes from the declassified version, still available online:
The judgments came from “a body of reporting from multiple sources that are consistent with our understanding of Russian behavior,” which was based on “the behavior of Kremlin-loyal political figures, state media, and pro-Kremlin social media actors, all of whom the Kremlin either directly uses to convey messages or who are answerable to the Kremlin.”
This is clearly wishful thinking. They formulated the desired conclusion and worked their way backwards, which just so happened dovetailed entirely with Clinton’s justification for losing the election the New York Times gave her a 99% chance of winning.
The most suspicious bit about this 25-page report was that seven pages were devoted to RT, and much of that material consisted of an annex written several years prior, analyzing reporting by RT America. It was not even related to the 2016 election!
Through the efforts of Congressman Devin Nunes and his aide Kash Patel (now head of the FBI), it later emerged that the “Steele Dossier” had served as the predicate for a FISA warrant to spy on Trump’s campaign and presidency, via Carter Page. The dossier itself was exposed as bogus. Moreover, documents emerged showing that the FBI knew it was bogus, but Comey (and Peter Strzok, Andrew McCabe and others) insisted on using it anyway.
Then, in November 2018, BuzzFeed - which had published the original “Steele Dossier”, thereby (very inadvertently) spoiling the spies’ influence campaign - published seven-page memo from Clapper’s ODNI to Senate Democrats, proving that the ICA was based entirely on wishful thinking. Again, see for yourself:
The US intelligence community is “confident” that the Russian government was behind the “compromises” of emails, because their release is “consistent with the methods and motivations of Russian-directed efforts,” the talking points say.
“We believe, based on the scope and sensitivity of these efforts, that only Russia’s senior-most officials could have authorized these activities,” the memo goes on to say.
Blaming Russia for the hack of the DNC and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCC) was based on “the forensic evidence identified by a private cyber-firm” [CrowdStrike, a DNC contractor led by Atlantic Council fellow Dmitry Alperovich] and the spies’ “own review and understanding of cyber activities by the Russian Government.”
The ODNI says they “are not definitively attributing the intrusions into state elections systems to the Russian Government.” But “the fact that they are consistent with Russian motivations and intent behind the DNC and DCCC intrusions, strongly suggests that Russia is responsible.”
Look at the bits in bold. Read them once again. Consistent with methods and motivations. Could have. Strongly suggests.
Shortly after the ICA was made public, Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) infamously went on TV and said Trump should not cross the intelligence community, because “they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you.” As in, they could create a fake claim of “Russian meddling” to discredit the presidency (and advance WW3 along the way), slander and defame decent people left and right, and actually undermine the government and the constitution they had sworn to serve?
Smells a bit like treason, to be honest, and not just “multiple procedural anomalies,” no matter how hard the CIA now tries to spin it.