The much-hyped Obama intelligence report that determined “Vladimir Putin ordered” Hillary Clinton’s campaign emails hacked and leaked “to help Trump’s chances of victory” has been accepted as gospel among DC punditry and given the investigations besieging the Trump presidency their legs. To date, no evidence has publicly emerged to corroborate the report, and the reason may have a lot to do with that sketchy dossier bought and paid for by Clinton.
Suspiciously, Barack Obama’s Intelligence Community Assessment matches the main allegations leveled by the Clinton-paid dossier on Trump, which wormed its way into intelligence channels, in addition to the FBI, Justice Department and State Department, during the 2016 campaign.
In fact, the shady dossier makes exactly the same claim — that Putin personally “ordered” the cyberattacks on the Clinton campaign and leaked embarrassing emails to “bolster Trump,” as part of “an aggressive Trump support operation.” Like Obama’s ICA, Clinton’s dossier provides no concrete evidence to back up the claim.
After learning Obama Justice and FBI officials relied heavily on unsubstantiated rumors in the dossier to wiretap a Trump adviser during the election, congressional leaders now suspect the dossier also informed Obama intelligence officials who compiled the ICA.
The report was released Jan. 6, 2017 — the same day intelligence officials attached a written summary of the dossier to a highly classified Russia briefing they gave Obama about the dossier, and the day after Obama held a secret White House meeting to discuss the dossier with his national security adviser and FBI director.
Staff investigators for GOP Rep. Devin Nunes’ intelligence committee, for one, are now going over “every word” of the ICA — including classified footnotes — to see if any of the analysis was pre-cooked based on the dossier. On Tuesday, Nunes sent letters to Obama intel officials responsible for the report. He demanded former top spook John Brennan and intel czar James Clapper provide answers about how they used the dossier in intel reports and when they learned the Clinton camp paid for it.
Under oath, Brennan has denied knowing the Clinton campaign commissioned the dossier. He also told the House intelligence panel the CIA didn’t rely on the dossier “in any way” for its reports on Russian interference. Committee staff are taking a second look at his May 2017 testimony.
Clapper, for his part, conceded in a recent CNN interview that the ICA was based on “some of the substantive content of the dossier.” Without elaborating, he maintained that “we were able to corroborate” certain allegations.
Clapper has also admitted he broke with tradition and didn’t put out the assessment to all 17 US intelligence agencies for review. (The New York Times and other media have parroted Clinton in falsely stating the ICA was the “unanimous” conclusion of “all 17 agencies.”)
Instead, he says he limited input to a couple dozen “handpicked” analysts from three agencies — the CIA, NSA and FBI — and that the report was drafted under the supervision of his office. All three agencies agreed Putin hacked and leaked Clinton’s emails to “help Trump’s chances of victory” — though the NSA, which captures Russian signals, expressed only “moderate confidence” in the conclusion.
The Defense Intelligence Agency, Homeland Security, State Department’s intelligence bureau and other agencies with relevant expertise on Russia were excluded, in violation of normal rules for drafting such assessments. And in another departure from custom, the report is missing any dissenting views or an annex with evaluations of the conclusions from outside reviewers.
US intel veterans suspect the administration “manipulated” the process to reach a “predetermined political conclusion” in order to delegitimize Trump.
“The best way to skew an intelligence assessment is to limit the number of players,” said Fred Fleitz, who worked as a CIA analyst for 19 years and helped draft national intelligence estimates at Langley. He says “there is no question in my mind” that political propaganda from the dossier made it into the January 2017 assessment.
Brennan and Clapper suggested that a new indictment filed by special counsel Robert Mueller against 13 Russian nationals for interfering in the election validates their assessment.
But the indictment doesn’t go as far as the ICA. It doesn’t, for example, link the Facebook trolling gang to Putin or Russian intelligence, or to any hacking operations.
So far, the investigative evidence is not lining up with the ICA’s conclusions. That’s because “the ICA is for the most part simply a reflection of the dossier’s central findings,” Fleitz said. Congressional investigators agree the similarities are “suspicious.”
Clapper claims the parts of the dossier incorporated in the ICA were “corroborated” by independent “sources and methods” that cannot be revealed and are tucked away in the footnotes of the classified version of the report.
We heard the same story about the FISA warrants, only to learn the corroboration of the dossier they were based on was a Yahoo! News article that merely sourced the dossier. Obama’s investigators and prosecutors lied. Now it’s time to investigate his spies.
Paul Sperry is an investigative journalist and author of “Infiltration” and “The Great American Bank Robbery.”