“The [Mueller] report also concedes that Mueller’s team did not determine another critical component of the crime it alleges: how the stolen Democratic material was transferred to WikiLeaks. The July 2018 indictment of GRU officers suggested – without stating outright – that WikiLeaks published the Democratic Party emails after receiving them from Guccifer 2.0 in a file named “wk dnc linkI .txt.gpg” on or around July 14, 2016. But now the report acknowledges that Mueller has not actually established how WikiLeaks acquired the stolen information: “The Office cannot rule out that stolen documents were transferred to WikiLeaks through intermediaries who visited during the summer of 2016.” Nor has evidence been provided to substantiate the “bombshell” “central allegation” that a US spy in Putin’s inner circle told the US that Putin ordered his government to take steps to ensure Trump won the election. And that 3 years later, the alleged spy is in good health. We’re often told that Putin is a former KGB spy, that this background informs his personality and style of running his government. Now we’re being told that former KGB spy Putin has allowed a US spy to reside in his inner circle, knows that the alleged US spy released secret, timely, “bombshell” information that will cause many more US tanks to line the Russian border and incite hatred of Putin, that 3 years later in 2019, the alleged “spy” is alive and in good health wherever he or she might be. In any case, we’ll be told evidence about the alleged spy is “classified.” Proof if needed that the US is a Failed State. It has become the world's most vicious boys' club/monarchy. US taxpayers are its slaves.
Image: Russian troll farm’s most shared pre-election Facebook post was a cartoon of a gun-wielding Yosemite Sam.7/5/19, “CrowdStrikeOut: Mueller’s Own Report Undercuts Its Core Russia-Meddling Claims,” Real Clear Investigations, Aaron Mate
“At a May press conference capping his tenure as special counsel, Robert Mueller emphasized what he called “the central allegation” of the two-year Russia probe. The Russian government, Mueller sternly declared, engaged in “multiple, systematic efforts to interfere in our election, and that allegation deserves the attention of every American." Mueller’s comments echoed a January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) asserting with “high confidence” that Russia conducted a sweeping 2016 election influence campaign. “I don’t think we’ve ever encountered a more aggressive or direct campaign to interfere in our election process,” then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper told a Senate hearing.
While the 448-page Mueller report found no conspiracy between Donald Trump’s campaign and Russia, it offered voluminous details to support the sweeping conclusion that the Kremlin worked to secure Trump’s victory. The report claims that the interference operation occurred “principally” on two fronts: Russian military intelligence officers hacked and leaked embarrassing Democratic Party documents, and a government-linked troll farm orchestrated a sophisticated and far-reaching social media campaign that denigrated Hillary Clinton and promoted Trump.
But a close examination of the report shows that none of those headline assertions are supported by the report’s evidence or other publicly available sources. They are further undercut by investigative shortcomings and the conflicts of interest of key players involved:
*The report uses qualified and vague language to describe key events, indicating that Mueller and his investigators do not actually know for certain whether Russian intelligence officers stole Democratic Party emails, or how those emails were transferred to WikiLeaks.
*The report’s timeline of events appears to defy logic. According to its narrative, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange announced the publication of Democratic Party emails not only before he received the documents but before he even communicated with the source that provided them.
*There is strong reason to doubt Mueller’s suggestion that an alleged Russian cutout called Guccifer 2.0 supplied the stolen emails to Assange.
*Mueller’s decision not to interview Assange – a central figure who claims Russia was not behind the hack – suggests an unwillingness to explore avenues of evidence on fundamental questions.
*U.S. intelligence officials cannot make definitive conclusions about the hacking of the Democratic National Committee computer servers because they did not analyze those servers themselves. Instead, they relied on the forensics of CrowdStrike, a private contractor for the DNC that was not a neutral party, much as “Russian dossier” compiler Christopher Steele, also a DNC contractor, was not a neutral party. This puts two Democrat-hired contractors squarely behind underlying allegations in the affair – a key circumstance that Mueller ignores.
*Further, the government allowed CrowdStrike and the Democratic Party’s legal counsel to submit redacted records, meaning CrowdStrike and not the government decided what could be revealed or not regarding evidence of hacking.
*Mueller’s report conspicuously does not allege that the Russian government carried out the social media campaign. Instead it blames, as Mueller said in his closing remarks, “a private Russian entity“ known as the Internet Research Agency (IRA).
*Mueller also falls far short of proving that the Russian social campaign was sophisticated, or even more than minimally related to the 2016 election. As with the collusion and Russian hacking allegations, Democratic officials had a central and overlooked hand in generating the alarm about Russian social media activity.
*John Brennan, then director of the CIA, played a seminal and overlooked role in all facets of what became Mueller’s investigation: the suspicions that triggered the initial collusion probe; the allegations of Russian interference; and the intelligence assessment that purported to validate the interference allegations that [admitted liar and criminal] Brennan himself helped generate. Yet Brennan has since revealed himself to be, like CrowdStrike and Steele, hardly a neutral party — in fact a partisan with a deep animus toward Trump. [Brennan had previously committed a criminal act against the US government, ordered 5 others in the CIA to join him in this crime against the American people, lied about these acts among others, and was not only not fired by Obama, was rewarded by being hired as an “expert” on NBC TV].
None of this means that the Mueller report’s core finding of “sweeping and systematic” Russian government election interference is necessarily false. But his report does not present sufficient evidence to substantiate it. This shortcoming has gone overlooked in the partisan battle over two more highly charged aspects of Mueller’s report: potential Trump-Russia collusion and Trump’s potential obstruction of the resulting investigation. As Mueller prepares to testify before House committees later this month, the questions surrounding his [Mueller’s] claims of a far-reaching Russian influence campaign are no less important. They raise doubts about the genesis and perpetuation of Russiagate and the performance of those tasked with investigating it.
Uncertainty Over Who Stole the Emails
The Mueller report’s narrative of Russian hacking and leaking was initially laid out in a July 2018 indictment of 12 Russian intelligence officers and is detailed further in the report.
According to Mueller, operatives at Russia’s main intelligence agency, the GRU, broke into Clinton campaign Chairman John Podesta’s emails in March 2016. The hackers infiltrated Podesta’s account with a common tactic called spear-phishing, duping him with a phony security alert that led him to enter his password. The GRU then used stolen Democratic Party credentials to hack into the DNC and Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) servers beginning in April 2016. Beginning in June 2016, the report claims, the GRU created two online personas, “DCLeaks” and “Guccifer 2.0,” to begin releasing the stolen material. After making contact later that month, Guccifer 2.0 apparently transferred the DNC emails to the whistleblowing, anti-secrecy publisher WikiLeaks, which released the first batch on July 22 ahead of the Democratic National Convention.
The report presents this narrative with remarkable specificity: It describes in detail how GRU officers installed malware, leased U.S.-based computers, and used cryptocurrencies to carry out their hacking operation. The intelligence that caught the GRU hackers is portrayed as so invasive and precise that it even captured the keystrokes of individual Russian officers, including their use of search engines.
In fact, the report contains crucial gaps in the evidence that might support that authoritative account. Here is how it describes the core crime under investigation, the alleged GRU theft of DNC emails:
Between approximately May 25, 2016 and June 1, 2016, GRU [Russian military] officers accessed the DNC’s mail server from a GRU-controlled computer leased inside the United States. During these connections, Unit 26165 officers appear to have stolen thousands of emails and attachments, which were later released by WikiLeaks in July 2016. [Italics added for emphasis.]
Yosemite Sam: Election-meddlin’ Russian varmint? Facebook
Yet another reason to question the Russian operation’s sophistication is the quality of its content. The IRA’s most shared pre-election Facebook post was a cartoon of a gun-wielding Yosemite Sam. On Instagram, the best-received image urged users to give it a “Like” if they believe in Jesus.
The top IRA post on Facebook before the election that mentioned Hillary Clinton was a conspiratorial screed about voter fraud.
Another ad featured Jesus consoling a dejected young man by telling him: “Struggling with the addiction to masturbation? Reach out to me and we will beat it together.”
Mueller also reports that the IRA successfully organized “dozens” of rallies “while posing as U.S. grassroots activists.” [This is of course a lie. A “successful,” “organized” rally requires speakers and lots of rallyers, but there’s no evidence anyone attended the so-called rallies with one exception, posted below, in which video shows 8 people attended. Who did the native Russian speakers that comprise the troll farm obtain to speak at these “organized rallies?” Were the “successful rallies” led by native Russian speakers?] Sounds impressive, but it appears to have been in Houston [and not related to the election], where Russian trolls allegedly organized dueling rallies pitting a dozen white supremacists against several dozen counter-protesters outside an Islamic center. Elsewhere, the IRA had underwhelming results, according to media reports: At several rallies in Florida “it’s unclear if anyone attended,“ the Daily Beast later noted; “no people showed up to at least one,” and “ragtag groups” showed up at others, the Washington Post reported, including one where video footage captured a crowd of eight people.
Far from exposing a sophisticated propaganda campaign, the reports suggest that Russian troll farm workers engaged in futile efforts to spark contentious rallies in a handful of states. When it comes to the ads, they may have been engaging in clickbait capitalism: targeting unique demographics like African Americans or evangelicals in a bid to attract large audiences for commercial purposes. Reporters who have profiled the IRA have commonly described it as “a social media marketing campaign.” Mueller’s February 2018 indictment of the IRA disclosed that it sold “promotions and advertisements” on its pages that generally sold in the $25-$50 range. “This strategy,” a Senate report from Oxford University’s Computational Propaganda Project observes, “is not an invention for politics and foreign intrigue, it is consistent with techniques used in digital marketing.”
That, in fact, was Facebook’s initial conclusion. As the Washington Post first reported, Facebook’s initial review of Russian social media activity in late 2016 and early 2017 found that the troll farm’s pages “had clear financial motives, which suggested that they weren’t working for a foreign government.”
That view only changed, the Post added, after “aides to Hillary Clinton and Obama” developed “theories” to help them “explain what they saw as an unnatural turn of events” in their loss of the 2016 election. Among these theories: “Russian operatives who were directed by the Kremlin to support Trump may have taken advantage of Facebook and other social media platforms to direct their messages to American voters in key demographic areas.”
Despite the fact that “these former advisers didn’t have hard evidence,” the Democratic aides found a receptive audience in both congressional intelligence committees. Democrat Mark Warner, the Senate intel vice chairman, personally flew out to Facebook headquarters in California to press the case. Not long after, in the summer of 2017, Facebook went public with its new “findings” about Russian trolls. Mueller has followed their lead – just as the FBI followed the leads of other Democratic sources in pursuing both the collusion (Fusion GPS) and Russian hacking (CrowdStrike) allegations.
John Brennan and the ICA
As it falls short of proving its case for a “sweeping and systematic” Russian interference campaign, the Mueller report also fails to support its claim regarding the motive behind such efforts. In the introduction to Volume I, Mueller states that “the investigation established that the Russian government perceived it would benefit from a Trump presidency and worked to secure that outcome.” But nowhere in the ensuing 440 pages does Mueller produce any evidence to substantiate that central claim.
Instead Mueller appears to be relying on the intelligence community assessment (ICA) released in January 2017 – four months before his appointment – that accused the Russian government of running an “influence campaign” that aimed “to undermine public faith in the U.S. democratic process,” and hurt Hillary Clinton’s “electability and potential presidency” as part of what it called Russia’s “clear preference for President-elect Trump.”
But the ICA itself produced no evidence for any of these assertions. Its equivocation is even more blunt than Mueller’s:
The ICA report’s conclusions, it states, are “not intended to imply that we have proof that shows something to be a fact.”
On the core conclusion that Russia aimed to help Trump, there is not even uniformity: While the FBI and CIA claim to have “high confidence” in that judgment, the NSA makes a conspicuous deviation in expressing that it has only “moderate confidence.”
As it casts doubt on a core allegation of Russia’s alleged motives, the NSA’s dissent debunks the oft-repeated claim that the ICA represented the consensus view of all 17 U.S. intelligence agencies.
Moreover, it would even be misleading to portray the ICA as the product of the three agencies that produced it – the CIA, FBI, and NSA. Instead, there are multiple indications that the ICA is primarily the work of one person, who would spend the next two years accusing Trump of treason: then-CIA Director John Brennan.
A March 2018 report from Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee says that Brennan personally oversaw the entire ICA process from start to finish. In December 2016, the GOP report recounts, President Obama “directed … Brennan to conduct a review of all intelligence relating to Russian involvement in the 2016 elections.“ The resulting ICA “was drafted by CIA analysts“ and merely “coordinated with the NSA and the FBI.” The GOP report observes that Brennan’s CIA analysts were “subjected to an unusually constrained review and coordination process, which deviated from established CIA practice.” [Italics added for emphasis.] A lengthy Democratic rebuttal to the GOP members’ report does not refute (or even address) any of these findings.
Echoing the NSA’s dissent, the House GOP questions the ICA’s conclusion that Putin interfered to secure Trump’s victory. The committee, they write, “identified significant intelligence tradecraft failings that undermine confidence in the ICA judgments regarding Russian President Vladimir Putin’s [alleged] strategic objectives for disrupting the U.S. election.” [Italics added for emphasis.]
The Brennan-run process may have also excluded dissenting views from other agencies. Jack Matlock, the former U.S. Ambassador to Russia, has claimed that a “senior official” from the State Department’s intelligence wing, the Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR), informed him that it had reached a different conclusion about alleged Russian meddling, “but was not allowed to express it.” An INR spokesperson declined a request for comment.
The ICA’s production schedule also raises a red flag: The outgoing Obama administration tasked Brennan with churning it out in seemingly unprecedented time. “Ordinarily, the kind of assessment that you’re talking about, there would be something that would take well over a year to do, certainly many months to do,” former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy told the House Intelligence Committee in June. “…[S]eems to me, in this instance, there was a rush to get that out within a matter of days.” [Posted two paragraphs below, Obama knew first hand that Brennan had no problem lying and committing crimes against the American people given the opportunity].
But even if Brennan had been given all the time in the world, the very fact that he was placed in charge of the intelligence assessment was a massive conflict of interest. Brennan was handed the opportunity to validate, without independent scrutiny or oversight from unbiased sources, serious allegations that he himself helped generate.”…
[2013-2014: Crime ordered by John Brennan: “Five [CIA] agency employees–two lawyers and three computer specialists--surreptitiously [broke into] searched Senate Intelligence Committee [confidential] files and reviewed some committee staff members’ e-mail on computers that were supposed to be exclusively for congressional investigators, according to a summary of the CIA inspector general’s report.”...After first lying and denying it had done so, “The Central Intelligence Agency admitted that it did, indeed, use a fake online identity to break into the Senate’s computers.”…”An apology and an internal review board might suffice if this were Brennan or intelligence leaders’ first offense, but the track record is far from spotless. In 2011, Brennan claimed that dozens of U.S. drone strikes on overseas targets had not killed a single civilian. This remarkable success rate was not only disputed at the time by news reports — even supporters of the drone program called it “absurd” — but as the Bureau of Investigative Journalism and the New York Times both reported later, President Obama received reports from the very beginning of his presidency about drone strikes killing numerous civilians. As Obama’s top counterterrorism adviser at the time, Brennan would have received these reports as well, so…Brennan knew that his claim was a lie.”…7/31/2014, “Obama should fire John Brennan,“ Washington Post, James Downie, Digital Opinions Editor, 7/31/2014, “The C.I.A.’s Reckless Breach of Trust,” NY Times Editorial Board]
(continuing): “Efforts to reach Brennan through MSNBC, where he is a commentator, were unsuccessful.
Months before he oversaw the intelligence assessment, Brennan played a critical role in the FBI’s decision to open the probe of Trump-Russia collusion.“I was aware of intelligence and information about contacts between Russian officials and U.S. persons that raised concerns in my mind about whether or not those individuals were cooperating with the Russians, either in a witting or unwitting fashion,” Brennan told Congress in March 2017, “and it served as the basis for the FBI investigation to determine whether such collusion-cooperation occurred.”
On top of his self-described role in generating the investigation of possible Trump-Russia collusion, Brennan also played a critical role in generating the claim that the Russian government was waging an influence campaign. According to the book “The Apprentice” by the Washington Post’s Greg Miller, the CIA unit known as “Russia House” was “the point of origin” for the U.S. intelligence community’s conclusion during the presidential campaign that “the Kremlin was actively seeking to elect Trump.“ Brennan sequestered himself in his office to pore over the CIA’s material, “staying so late that the glow through his office windows remained visible deep into the night.” Brennan “ordered up,” not just vetted, “‘finished’ assessments – analytic reports that had gone through layers of review and revision,” Miller adds, but also “what agency veterans call the ‘raw stuff’ – the unprocessed underlying material.
Yet another reason to question the Russian operation’s sophistication is the quality of its content. The IRA’s most shared pre-election Facebook post was a cartoon of a gun-wielding Yosemite Sam. On Instagram, the best-received image urged users to give it a “Like” if they believe in Jesus.
The top IRA post on Facebook before the election that mentioned Hillary Clinton was a conspiratorial screed about voter fraud.
Another ad featured Jesus consoling a dejected young man by telling him: “Struggling with the addiction to masturbation? Reach out to me and we will beat it together.”
Mueller also reports that the IRA successfully organized “dozens” of rallies “while posing as U.S. grassroots activists.” [This is of course a lie. A “successful,” “organized” rally requires speakers and lots of rallyers, but there’s no evidence anyone attended the so-called rallies with one exception, posted below, in which video shows 8 people attended. Who did the native Russian speakers that comprise the troll farm obtain to speak at these “organized rallies?” Were the “successful rallies” led by native Russian speakers?] Sounds impressive, but it appears to have been in Houston [and not related to the election], where Russian trolls allegedly organized dueling rallies pitting a dozen white supremacists against several dozen counter-protesters outside an Islamic center. Elsewhere, the IRA had underwhelming results, according to media reports: At several rallies in Florida “it’s unclear if anyone attended,“ the Daily Beast later noted; “no people showed up to at least one,” and “ragtag groups” showed up at others, the Washington Post reported, including one where video footage captured a crowd of eight people.
Far from exposing a sophisticated propaganda campaign, the reports suggest that Russian troll farm workers engaged in futile efforts to spark contentious rallies in a handful of states. When it comes to the ads, they may have been engaging in clickbait capitalism: targeting unique demographics like African Americans or evangelicals in a bid to attract large audiences for commercial purposes. Reporters who have profiled the IRA have commonly described it as “a social media marketing campaign.” Mueller’s February 2018 indictment of the IRA disclosed that it sold “promotions and advertisements” on its pages that generally sold in the $25-$50 range. “This strategy,” a Senate report from Oxford University’s Computational Propaganda Project observes, “is not an invention for politics and foreign intrigue, it is consistent with techniques used in digital marketing.”
That, in fact, was Facebook’s initial conclusion. As the Washington Post first reported, Facebook’s initial review of Russian social media activity in late 2016 and early 2017 found that the troll farm’s pages “had clear financial motives, which suggested that they weren’t working for a foreign government.”
That view only changed, the Post added, after “aides to Hillary Clinton and Obama” developed “theories” to help them “explain what they saw as an unnatural turn of events” in their loss of the 2016 election. Among these theories: “Russian operatives who were directed by the Kremlin to support Trump may have taken advantage of Facebook and other social media platforms to direct their messages to American voters in key demographic areas.”
Despite the fact that “these former advisers didn’t have hard evidence,” the Democratic aides found a receptive audience in both congressional intelligence committees. Democrat Mark Warner, the Senate intel vice chairman, personally flew out to Facebook headquarters in California to press the case. Not long after, in the summer of 2017, Facebook went public with its new “findings” about Russian trolls. Mueller has followed their lead – just as the FBI followed the leads of other Democratic sources in pursuing both the collusion (Fusion GPS) and Russian hacking (CrowdStrike) allegations.
John Brennan and the ICA
As it falls short of proving its case for a “sweeping and systematic” Russian interference campaign, the Mueller report also fails to support its claim regarding the motive behind such efforts. In the introduction to Volume I, Mueller states that “the investigation established that the Russian government perceived it would benefit from a Trump presidency and worked to secure that outcome.” But nowhere in the ensuing 440 pages does Mueller produce any evidence to substantiate that central claim.
Instead Mueller appears to be relying on the intelligence community assessment (ICA) released in January 2017 – four months before his appointment – that accused the Russian government of running an “influence campaign” that aimed “to undermine public faith in the U.S. democratic process,” and hurt Hillary Clinton’s “electability and potential presidency” as part of what it called Russia’s “clear preference for President-elect Trump.”
But the ICA itself produced no evidence for any of these assertions. Its equivocation is even more blunt than Mueller’s:
The ICA report’s conclusions, it states, are “not intended to imply that we have proof that shows something to be a fact.”
On the core conclusion that Russia aimed to help Trump, there is not even uniformity: While the FBI and CIA claim to have “high confidence” in that judgment, the NSA makes a conspicuous deviation in expressing that it has only “moderate confidence.”
As it casts doubt on a core allegation of Russia’s alleged motives, the NSA’s dissent debunks the oft-repeated claim that the ICA represented the consensus view of all 17 U.S. intelligence agencies.
Moreover, it would even be misleading to portray the ICA as the product of the three agencies that produced it – the CIA, FBI, and NSA. Instead, there are multiple indications that the ICA is primarily the work of one person, who would spend the next two years accusing Trump of treason: then-CIA Director John Brennan.
A March 2018 report from Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee says that Brennan personally oversaw the entire ICA process from start to finish. In December 2016, the GOP report recounts, President Obama “directed … Brennan to conduct a review of all intelligence relating to Russian involvement in the 2016 elections.“ The resulting ICA “was drafted by CIA analysts“ and merely “coordinated with the NSA and the FBI.” The GOP report observes that Brennan’s CIA analysts were “subjected to an unusually constrained review and coordination process, which deviated from established CIA practice.” [Italics added for emphasis.] A lengthy Democratic rebuttal to the GOP members’ report does not refute (or even address) any of these findings.
Echoing the NSA’s dissent, the House GOP questions the ICA’s conclusion that Putin interfered to secure Trump’s victory. The committee, they write, “identified significant intelligence tradecraft failings that undermine confidence in the ICA judgments regarding Russian President Vladimir Putin’s [alleged] strategic objectives for disrupting the U.S. election.” [Italics added for emphasis.]
The Brennan-run process may have also excluded dissenting views from other agencies. Jack Matlock, the former U.S. Ambassador to Russia, has claimed that a “senior official” from the State Department’s intelligence wing, the Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR), informed him that it had reached a different conclusion about alleged Russian meddling, “but was not allowed to express it.” An INR spokesperson declined a request for comment.
The ICA’s production schedule also raises a red flag: The outgoing Obama administration tasked Brennan with churning it out in seemingly unprecedented time. “Ordinarily, the kind of assessment that you’re talking about, there would be something that would take well over a year to do, certainly many months to do,” former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy told the House Intelligence Committee in June. “…[S]eems to me, in this instance, there was a rush to get that out within a matter of days.” [Posted two paragraphs below, Obama knew first hand that Brennan had no problem lying and committing crimes against the American people given the opportunity].
But even if Brennan had been given all the time in the world, the very fact that he was placed in charge of the intelligence assessment was a massive conflict of interest. Brennan was handed the opportunity to validate, without independent scrutiny or oversight from unbiased sources, serious allegations that he himself helped generate.”…
[2013-2014: Crime ordered by John Brennan: “Five [CIA] agency employees–two lawyers and three computer specialists--surreptitiously [broke into] searched Senate Intelligence Committee [confidential] files and reviewed some committee staff members’ e-mail on computers that were supposed to be exclusively for congressional investigators, according to a summary of the CIA inspector general’s report.”...After first lying and denying it had done so, “The Central Intelligence Agency admitted that it did, indeed, use a fake online identity to break into the Senate’s computers.”…”An apology and an internal review board might suffice if this were Brennan or intelligence leaders’ first offense, but the track record is far from spotless. In 2011, Brennan claimed that dozens of U.S. drone strikes on overseas targets had not killed a single civilian. This remarkable success rate was not only disputed at the time by news reports — even supporters of the drone program called it “absurd” — but as the Bureau of Investigative Journalism and the New York Times both reported later, President Obama received reports from the very beginning of his presidency about drone strikes killing numerous civilians. As Obama’s top counterterrorism adviser at the time, Brennan would have received these reports as well, so…Brennan knew that his claim was a lie.”…7/31/2014, “Obama should fire John Brennan,“ Washington Post, James Downie, Digital Opinions Editor, 7/31/2014, “The C.I.A.’s Reckless Breach of Trust,” NY Times Editorial Board]
(continuing): “Efforts to reach Brennan through MSNBC, where he is a commentator, were unsuccessful.
Months before he oversaw the intelligence assessment, Brennan played a critical role in the FBI’s decision to open the probe of Trump-Russia collusion.“I was aware of intelligence and information about contacts between Russian officials and U.S. persons that raised concerns in my mind about whether or not those individuals were cooperating with the Russians, either in a witting or unwitting fashion,” Brennan told Congress in March 2017, “and it served as the basis for the FBI investigation to determine whether such collusion-cooperation occurred.”
On top of his self-described role in generating the investigation of possible Trump-Russia collusion, Brennan also played a critical role in generating the claim that the Russian government was waging an influence campaign. According to the book “The Apprentice” by the Washington Post’s Greg Miller, the CIA unit known as “Russia House” was “the point of origin” for the U.S. intelligence community’s conclusion during the presidential campaign that “the Kremlin was actively seeking to elect Trump.“ Brennan sequestered himself in his office to pore over the CIA’s material, “staying so late that the glow through his office windows remained visible deep into the night.” Brennan “ordered up,” not just vetted, “‘finished’ assessments – analytic reports that had gone through layers of review and revision,” Miller adds, but also “what agency veterans call the ‘raw stuff’ – the unprocessed underlying material.
Anyone familiar with how cherry-picked, false intelligence made the case for the Iraq War will recognize “raw material” as a red flag. Here’s another: According to Miller, one piece of intelligence that was “a particular source of alarm to Brennan,” was the “bombshell” from “sourcing deep inside the Kremlin” that Putin himself had “authorized a covert operation” in order to, “in his own words…damage Clinton and help elect Trump” via “a cyber campaign to disrupt and discredit the U.S. presidential race.” A former CIA operative described that sourcing as “the espionage equivalent of ‘the Holy Grail.'”
Undoubtedly, a [alleged] mole within Putin’s inner circle – able to capture his exact orders – would indeed fit that description. But that raises the obvious question: If such a crown jewel of espionage exists, why would anyone in U.S. intelligence allow it to be revealed? And why hadn’t that “Holy Grail” source been able to forewarn its American intelligence handlers of any number of Putin’s actions that have caught the U.S. off-guard, from the annexation of Crimea to the Russian intervention in Syria?
Brennan was the first to alert President Obama of a Russian interference campaign, and subsequently oversaw the U.S. intelligence response.
Since leaving office, Brennan has laid bare his personal animus towards Trump, going so far as to call him “treasonous” – an unprecedented charge for a former top intelligence official to make about a sitting president. In the weeks before Mueller issued his final report, Brennan was still predicting that members of Trump’s inner circle, including family members, would be indicted. Given Brennan’s bias and consistent patterns of errors, Mueller’s unquestioning, apparent reliance on a Brennan-run process is suspect.
Although Mueller seemed to accept the ICA’s explosive claims at face value, Brennan’s work product is now facing Justice Department scrutiny. The New York Times reported on June 12 that Attorney General William Barr is “interested in how the C.I.A. drew its conclusions about Russia’s election sabotage, particularly the judgment that Mr. Putin ordered that operatives help Mr. Trump.“ In what is most likely a direct reference to Brennan, the Times adds that Barr “wants to know more about the C.I.A. sources who helped inform its understanding of the details of the Russian interference campaign,” as well as about “the intelligence that flowed from the C.I.A. to the F.B.I. in the summer of 2016.”
Until Barr completes his review of the Russia probe, the April 2018 report from GOP members of the House Intelligence Committee remains the only publicly available assessment of the Brennan-controlled ICA’s methodology. One reason for this is the fact that President Obama personally quashed a proposed bipartisan commission of inquiry into alleged Russian interference that would have inevitably subjected Brennan and other top intelligence officials to scrutiny. According to the Washington Post, in the aftermath of the November election, Obama administration officials discussed forming such a commission to conduct a sweeping probe of the alleged Russian interference effort and the U.S. response. But after Obama’s then chief-of-staff, Denis McDonough, introduced the proposal, he:
began criticizing it, arguing that it would be perceived as partisan and almost certainly blocked by Congress. Obama then echoed McDonough’s critique, effectively killing any chance that a Russia commission would be formed.
With Obama having killed “any chance that a Russia commission would be formed,” there has been no thorough, independent oversight of the intelligence process that alleged an interference campaign by Russia and triggered an all-consuming investigation of the Trump campaign’s potential complicity.
New Opportunities to Answer Unresolved Questions
Barr’s ongoing review, and Mueller’s pending appearance before Congress, offer fresh opportunities to re-examine the affair’s fundamental inconsistencies. Authorized by the president to declassify documents, Barr could shed light on the role that CrowdStrike and other sources played in informing Mueller and the Brennan-directed ICA’s claims of a Russian interference campaign. When he appears before lawmakers, Mueller will likely face questions on other matters: from Democrats, his decision to punt on obstruction; from Republicans, his decision to carry out a prolonged investigation of Trump-Russia collusion despite likely knowing quite early on that there was no such case to make.
If the U.S. government does not have a solid case to make against Russia, then the origins of Russiagate, and its subsequent predominance of U.S. political and media focus, are potentially even more suspect. Given that allegation’s importance, and Mueller’s own uncertainty and inconsistencies, the special counsel and his aides deserve scrutiny for making a “central allegation” that they have yet to substantiate.”
…………………………………
Added: Brennan: “I don’t do evidence.”…"That is appropriately classified."…May 23, 2017. The US is a monarchy. We are slaves. We'll be free again only if US is broken into parts. SW open border states could join Mexico, for example.
May 23, 2017, Brennan at a House committee hearing-–just Beltway pals putting on a charade for the rubes:
“Rep. Gowdy: When you learned of Russian efforts, did you have evidence of a connection between the Trump campaign and Russian state actors?
BRENNAN: As I said Mr. Gowdy, I don’t do evidence.”…
At same hearing:
May 23, 2017: When Beltway pal asks for “evidence,” Brennan says it’s “classified:”
“BRENNAN: I encountered and am aware of information and intelligence that revealed contacts and interactions between Russian officials and U.S. persons involved in the Trump campaign that I was concerned about because of known Russian efforts to suborn such individuals and it raised questions in my mind, again, whether or not the Russians were able to gain the cooperation of those individuals….
GOWDY: Do you know the basis of that information that you shared with the bureau? What was — the nature of the evidence?
BRENNAN: I think, Mr. Gowdy, this committee has now been provided information that relates to that issue in terms of information that the agency shared with the bureau and that is something that is appropriately classified.”...May 23, 2017, “Gowdy Grills Brennan: Do You Have Evidence Of Trump-Russia Collusion Or Not? Brennan: “I Don’t Do Evidence”,” Real Clear Politics, Tim Hains
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