This past week independent journalists Michael Shellenberger and Matt Taibbi revealed that Obama’s CIA honcho John Brennan doctored the critical January 2017 “Intelligence Community Assessment” (ICA) to make it appear that Vladimir Putin favored Trump for the presidency in 2016.
These journalists contend that the CIA is currently hiding at its headquarters a 50-page report asserting the opposite, namely that Putin favored Hillary.
In the way of background, President Barack Obama commissioned the ICA in December 2016. On Jan. 6, 2017 – a day that will live in infamy – the conspirators released the declassified version. This was Brennan’s way of welcoming the president-elect to Washington.
Titled “Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent U.S. Elections,” the report concluded that Putin “ordered” an influence campaign, the goal of which was “to undermine public faith in the U.S. democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency.”
The corollary of this, of course, was that “Putin and the Russian Government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump.”
The “Obama dossier,” as Rep. Devin Nunes called the ICA, was so much garbage in a clear plastic bag. It reads like one of my college term papers, filled with sundry bits of information gathered from here and there just hours before the due date.
Among the ICA’s more obvious shortcomings is its failure to provide a credible rationale for Putin to disfavor Hillary Clinton so vehemently.
According to the ICA, Putin “publicly blamed her since 2011 for inciting mass protests against his regime” and “holds a grudge for comments he almost certainly saw as disparaging him.”
The ICA does not mention Hillary’s more than compensatory assets, like the role she and husband Bill played in facilitating the sale of Uranium One to Rosatom, the entity that controlled all things nuclear in Russia, including the arsenal.
Many of the report’s assertions were made with evidence no more convincing than that which tied Putin to Trump, including some in bold face such as “Putin Ordered Campaign To Influence U.S. Election” or the “Influence Effort Was Boldest Yet in the U.S.”
Lacking human intelligence in the Kremlin, the report writers had no idea what Putin did or did not order. They conceded that, beginning in June 2016, Putin ceased “directly praising President-elect Trump” for the probable reason that “any praise from Putin personally would backfire in the United States.”
Unaddressed is why Putin showed such discretion in this regard and yet authorized a “multi-faceted” campaign so clumsy that it damaged Trump’s campaign and almost destroyed his presidency.
Much of the ICA bordered on irrelevance. If Russia’s primary television network, RT, favored Trump, it surely had less influence than the BBC or the scores of other networks, foreign and domestic, that favored Hillary.
The various trolls and bots on social media, if actually Russian in origin, had even less influence.
These desultory strands of information mostly just took up space in the assessment, much more space than the one “facet” of Putin’s influence campaign that actually merited the interest of the intelligence community, the cyber operations.
“In July 2015,” reported the ICA, “Russian intelligence gained access to Democratic National Committee (DNC) networks and maintained that access until at least June 2016.”
The report writers claimed that the GRU, the intelligence arm of the Russian military, hacked data “from the DNC and senior Democratic officials” and relayed it to WikiLeaks for publication.
The evidence for the hacking claim was much sketchier than the public has been led to believe. One reason the report spent so much pointless time on RT’s programming and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s past was to compensate for the absence of real proof.
“An assessment of attribution usually is not a simple statement of who conducted an operation,” the ICA insisted, “but rather a series of judgments that describe whether it was an isolated incident, who was the likely perpetrator, that perpetrator’s possible motivations, and whether a foreign government had a role in ordering or leading the operation.”
This was a long-winded way of saying there was no DNA, and the cyber fingerprints left behind could just as easily have been false-flagged.
It raises the question, too, of who was making the “judgments.” John Brennan? Peter Strzok? James Comey? Robert Mueller would indict a dozen Russians for interference only because he knew they would never show up in court.
The evidence was not there to convict them. He declined, however, to indict Assange. Assange would have shown up.
Undermining the whole study was one extraordinary failure by the FBI: The Bureau did not examine the servers the Russians allegedly hacked.
The ICA concealed this fact, but the truth came to light in a public feud between the DNC and the FBI. “The FBI never requested access to the DNC’s computer servers,” Eric Walker, the DNC’s deputy communications director, emphatically told BuzzFeed in an email two days before the ICA was released.
The FBI insisted otherwise. A day later, a senior FBI official fired back, “The FBI repeatedly stressed to DNC officials the necessity of obtaining direct access to servers and data, only to be rebuffed until well after the initial compromise had been mitigated.”
If DNC staffers repeatedly “rebuffed” the FBI, they may well have had something to hide, starting with the fact that the pilfering of data was likely an inside job.
This was a dispute that needed airing, but the drive-by media just drove by. They had a conspiracy to peddle. Here’s hoping Shellenberger and Taibbi can nail the conspirators.
via wnd
