BACKGROUND:
In late 2016, this blog explained there was no evidence WikiLeaks had published emails that were hacked by Russians from the Democrat National Committee. The DNC refused to let the friendly Obama FBI examine their computers. CrowdStrike, an outside company headed by ex-Russians who hated Putin, declared the Russians did it in one day, most likely at the request of Hillary Clinton, or her team.
Hillary Clinton then began claiming candidate Donald Trump was colluding with Russians to derail her campaign. I found that laughable, for two reasons.
The first reason is Donald Trump never colluded with anyone -- I wish he would collude with experts on subjects he knows little about. T rump is a one man band. He couldn't even collude with the Republican Party in 2016, and created enemies within the party that ended up hurting his effectiveness as President !
The second reason I didn't believe the "Russia did it" claim is the country of origin of any computer hack is a guess, unless the hackers are caught while their hacking is in progress. And they were NOT caught in progress. No evidence was ever provided to refute the WikiLeaks claim that DNC eMails were handed to them on a flash drive, by a DNC insider who was angry about how the DNC kept Bernie Sanders from getting the nomination in 2016. WikiLeaks' Julian Assange started a rumor that the person who leaked the emails was DNC employee Seth Rich, who had been murdered on the streets of Washington, D.C., with his money and phone not stolen, by offering a $10,000 reward for information leading to a Seth Rich prosecution. But Julian Assange and WikiLeaks have never before revealed their sources, so I imagine that rules Seth Rich out.
As I have guessed here many times, former CIA Director John Brennan was the instigator selling the Trump Russian collusion hoax to leaders in the Obama Administration . It is a hoax because there's no evidence at all, after four investigations., one led by a rabid team of Democrats under Andrew Weissman, allegedly reporting to "Republican" figurehead Robert Mueller, who didn't even know what was in "his" own report !
NEW INFORMATION:
John Brennan personally edited an intelligence report on Russian interference in the 2016 election after career analysts disputed his claim that Russian leader Vladimir Putin intervened in the 2016 election to help Donald Trump. This information is from two senior U.S. intelligence officials who have seen classified materials detailing Brennan’s role in drafting the document. The CIA director's conclusion was in a biased report by several of his cronies, called the "Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA). The ICA helped justify the "Robert Mueller probe". Special Counsel Robert Mueller's team found no proof that Trump, or any Trump campaign workers, ever conspired with Moscow.
The Obama Administration publicly released a declassified version of the ICA report, two weeks before Trump took office, placing a huge cloud of suspicion over his presidency. The ICA is a focus of U.S. Attorney John Durham’s investigation into the origins of the “Russian collusion” probe. Real Clear Investigations (RCI) reported a CIA operative who helped Brennan draft the ICA, Andrea Kendall-Taylor, financially supported Hillary Clinton during the campaign, and is a close colleague of Eric Ciaramella, identified last year by RCI as the Democratic national security “whistleblower" whose complaint led to Trump’s House impeachment, and followed by a Senate acquittal, in January.
The two CIA officials told Durham that Brennan openly supported Clinton during the 2016 campaign, and deliberately excluded conflicting evidence about Putin’s motives from the ICA report. Brennan did that over objections from intelligence analysts who said Putin wanted Hillary Clinton to win the election, and viewed Trump as an unpredictable “wild card.”
Remember that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton tried to “reset” relations with Moscow, while Trump campaigned on expanding the U.S. military, which Moscow saw as a threat. The two analysts said people in Russia tried to disrupt the American election process during the 2008, 2012 and 2016 elections. This nonsense started long before Donald Trump entered politics.
Their efforts were low budget, amateurish, and ineffective, suggesting the Russian government was not involved.
Brennan decided Putin supported Trump first, and then ignored or buried all contrary information. There was no evidence behind Brennan's claim. The CIA analysts who spoke up wanted to remain anonymous because they came under political pressure to back Brennan’s judgment (that Putin personally ordered "active measures” against the Clinton campaign to throw the election to Trump, even though the underlying CIA intelligence was “weak.")
Special prosecutor Durham recently interviewed Brennan for several hours at CIA headquarters, after obtaining his emails, call logs and other documents. Durham also questioned analysts and supervisors who worked on the ICA report.
A Republican-led congressional review had found the ICA was written in only 30 days, under the direction of Obama intelligence czar James Clapper. It did not follow longstanding rules for doing such assessments. It was not farmed out to other key intelligence agencies for their input. It did not include an annex for dissenting views. It was nothing like past intelligence assessments.
Right after Democrat Representative Adam "shifty" Schiff took control of the House Intelligence Committee in January 2019, the Republican-led congressional review of the drafting the ICA was classified, and locked in a basement safe. The Republican-led committee had spent more than 1,200 hours reviewing the ICA, and interviewing analysts involved in crafting it.
They had found the ICA was politicized and skewed to discredit Trump’s election. James Clapper had tasked CIA officer (and Democrat) Julia Gurganus, then assigned to the National Intelligence Council (NIC) as its national intelligence officer for Russia and Eurasia, with coordinating the ICA, working with (Democrat) Andrea Kendall-Taylor. From 2015 to 2018, Kendall-Taylor was assigned to the NIC where she was deputy national intelligence officer for Russia and Eurasia.
Both women worked with with the NIC’s cyber-security expert Vinh Nguyen, who had been consulting with Democratic National Committee cyber-security contractor CrowdStrike to gather intelligence on the alleged Russian hacking of the Democratic National Committee computer system. CrowdStrike’s president later testified he couldn’t say for sure Russian intelligence stole DNC emails, according to recently declassified transcripts.
Durham is said to be using that long-hidden 50+ page report for his investigation of whether the Obama administration politicized intelligence, ( while targeting the Trump campaign and presidential transition in an unprecedented investigation, involving wiretapping and other secret surveillance ) .
Durham recently interviewed John Brennan for several hours at CIA headquarters, after obtaining his emails, call logs and other documents from the agency. Durham has also quizzed analysts and supervisors who worked on the ICA.
A senior CIA official said Brennan did NOT seek input from experts from CIA’s so-called Russia House, a department within Langley officially called the Center for Europe and Eurasia, before arriving at the conclusion that Putin meddled in the election to benefit Trump. “It was not an intelligence assessment. It was not coordinated in the [intelligence] community or even with experts in Russia House,” the official said. "It was just a small group of people selected and driven by Brennan himself … and Brennan did the editing.” Only three agencies from the 17-agency intelligence community were invited to participate in the ICA. One of the three agencies, the NSA, had a lower level of confidence than the CIA and FBI on the "Russia did it" conclusion.
The CIA official said the NSA’s departure was significant because the agency monitors the communications of Russian officials overseas. Yet it could not corroborate Brennan’s conclusion.
Former NSA Director Michael Rogers, who has testified that the conclusion about Putin and Trump “didn’t have the same level of sourcing and the same level of multiple sources,” reportedly has been cooperating with Durham’s probe. A second senior intelligence officer confirmed that career intelligence analysts complained that the ICA was tightly controlled and manipulated by Brennan, who previously worked in the Obama White House. “It wasn’t 17 agencies and it wasn’t even a dozen analysts from the three agencies who wrote the assessment," as has been widely reported in the media, he said. "It was just five officers of the CIA who wrote it, and Brennan hand-picked all five. And the lead writer was a good friend of Brennan’s.”
Brennan's tight control over the ICA contradicts public claims the assessment reflected the “consensus of the entire intelligence community.” Senate judiciary and governmental affairs panels recently gained authority to subpoena Brennan, and other witnesses, to testify. Several Republican lawmakers and former Trump officials want the declassification and release of the long hidden, secret House committee report on the ICA.
An intelligence official who worked on the ICA review said John Brennan hid all sources and references to the underlying intelligence behind a highly sensitive and compartmented wall of classification. James Clapper created two classified versions of the ICA – a highly restricted Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information version that reveals the sourcing, and a more accessible Top Secret version that omits details about the sourcing. Unless the classification of compartmented findings can be downgraded, access to John Brennan’s questionable sourcing will remain highly restricted, leaving the underlying evidence conveniently hidden, the official said.
