Bogus Documents fueled the Russia Hoax

Another day, another damning release of documents by Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Tulsi Gabbard.

Last week it was the DNI memorandum concerning the January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA), which summarized key intelligence that was manipulated and withheld from the American public concerning the ICA’s findings that Russia interfered with the 2016 presidential election to assist Trump.

This time, it’s the declassification of the 2020 House Oversight Investigation & Referral of the ICA, a more thorough exposure of how top-level Obama Administration officials faked the intelligence, relied on bogus documents, and fueled the Russia Hoax that captured the attention of the nation, threatened the Trump Administration, and all but ruined a number of lives.

For a refresher on the ICA, recall that it included a few key findings:

• The ICA assessed that Putin and the Russian government “developed a clear preference” for Trump.

• The CIA and FBI assessed with “high confidence that Putin and the Russian Government aspired to help [Trump’s] chances of victory when possible by discrediting Secretary Clinton.”

• When Clinton’s victory appeared likely, “the Russian influence campaign began to focus more on undermining her future presidency.”

In reaching those conclusions, the Obama intelligence community relied on not only the Steele Dossier but other, more untrustworthy documents. As Matt Taibbi writes today, those other reports “weren’t just unsourced and unreliable, but discarded fictions pulled out of the CIA’s trash heap.”

In making the determination that Putin preferred Trump, the ICA (and the CIA) relied on a source that claimed Putin made the decision to leak the DNC emails “after he had come to believe that the Democratic nominee had better odds of winning the U.S. presidential election, and that [candidate Trump], whose victory Putin was counting on, most likely would not be able to pull off a convincing victory.”

There was, however, “no other intelligence corroborating” this claim, which was described in today’s declassified report as an “unclear fragment of a sentence” subject to multiple interpretations (five analysts read the sentence in five different ways), such as Putin counting on a Trump victory at the Republican Convention. The timing of that interpretation makes more sense, given the timing of the source’s reporting, which took place before Trump secured the Republican nomination.