Mollie Hemingway of the Federalist reports more damning news for a former Obama administration official.
Top officials working on an intelligence community analysis about Russia’s interference in the 2016 election were overruled by CIA Director John Brennan, according to records exclusively reviewed by The Federalist. The records are related to ongoing criminal investigations into Brennan and other top intelligence officials for their roles in launching the Russia collusion hoax.
The dispute was over the “key judgment” in a January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) that Russia had interfered in the election specifically because Putin and the Russian government “aspired to help President-elect Trump’s election chances.”
The senior intelligence officials pointed out the lack of evidence to substantiate the claim. “We have no intelligence to directly support this ‘aspiration’ point,” said one member of the small group of individuals working with Brennan, FBI Director James Comey, and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper on the assessment of Russian activity in the lead-up to the 2016 election.
The official worried that the inclusion of the claim would “open the IC to a line of very politicized inquiry that is sure to come up when this paper is shared with the Hill.” A recent CIA analysis of the inclusion of this disputed “key judgment” noted the risks of including poorly supported judgments since skeptical readers are inclined to “reject an entire analysis if a single judgment appears exaggerated, biased, or unsupported.”
The experts did not disagree that Russia had continued its practice of attempting to sow chaos in presidential elections. They believed the intelligence indicated Russia sought to weaken presumptive winner Hillary Clinton and those efforts may have indirectly helped Trump. But they were concerned about the lack of evidence for the claim that became a cornerstone of the Russia collusion narrative, in which Trump was accused of conspiring with Russia to steal the 2016 election.
“Can you really prove Moscow was trying to get Trump elected?” the official asked in late December 2016.
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Author: Mitch Kokai
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