The Political Origins of the Russia 'Collusion' Hoax
Kim Strassel: Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard declassifies, and releases a slew of documents showing the political origins of the Russia collusion hoax with CIA Director John Ratcliffe, promising more information yet to come. What have we learned and why does it matter? Welcome to All Things with Kim Strassel. Joining me this week to break down all this is reporter and old friend Michael Shellenberger, who's been following this for a number of years. Michael, it's been too long. Thank you for joining us this week.Michael Shellenberger: Thanks for having me on, Kim. Good to see you again.
Kim Strassel: We're going to dig down into this, but just to give my top line summary of what came out last week and what we now know. Gabbard declassified some internal documents and emails as well as a report from the House Intelligence Committee, which explained the final actions in the Obama administration that led to this public narrative in 2017 that Hillary Clinton had lost the election because Putin had interfered to aid Donald Trump. And this of course led to the whole Russia collusion narrative of the following years, including Special Counsel Bob Mueller. A lot of drama. But we now know though because of these docs is that the rank and file intel community had no real such evidence or belief, but it was rather the partisan leaders of the Obama administration, including the President, CIA Director John Brennan, FBI Director Jim Comey, DNI James Clapper, interfered in the usual process and essentially ordered up a report making this claim, stuffed it with a bunch of unreliable unverifiable info like the Steele dossier, and did so over the objections of career analysts and produced this bogus January 2017 assessment that launches hoax. Michael, is that your read or am I missing something here?
Michael Shellenberger: No, I think you got it. And I would just say there's been other documents released too. And so the CIA Director Ratcliffe also published a memo a couple of weeks ago pointing out things that the CIA had done wrong as it relates to this ICA or intelligence community assessment that comes out in January 2017. And then, as you mentioned, Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard also released a set of documents and emails showing a little bit more resolution, a little bit more detail as to the beginning of the Russiagate hoax after the 2016 election in December 2016. For me, I think far and away the most significant document that has been released maybe on all of Russiagate, probably on all of Russiagate, is the House report that you mentioned. This is the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. Everybody in Washington calls this HPSCI, so that's the language we should use, is the HPSCI report, this is the oversight report that investigated how did they create this intelligence community assessment. There's a whole long history of how they created this report, who was involved in it, this is Devin Nunes at the time was the head of the committee. But I had reported on this existence of this HPSCI report last year with my colleagues Matt Taibbi and Alex Gutentag. And so we had a sense of it, and we had reported that in fact, the intelligence appeared to show the opposite of what it said, that the Russians favored Hillary, not Trump, because they viewed her as more stable and more manageable in the words of somebody very close to this report. But Kim, just sitting down and reading it, it's 44 pages and it's incredibly well written, but it is absolutely damning. I mean, because it's actually going through point by point of the ICA and in a real debunking of it, and then it's citing all this other evidence. Obviously there could be a rebuttal to it, although we haven't seen that. But there is something about, for me, newcomers to this issue, and I hope there are newcomers to the issue because I think a lot of people, particularly on the left, but a lot of other people don't really understand how terrible this was and how significant it was. You sit down and read that initial intelligence community assessment and then you read this House HPSCI report, you will see that this was an absolute fraud and a travesty and really a crime against the American people and their decision to select Donald Trump as their president. And that is something that people really hate Trump. I get it. You might really just be against everything the Republican Party stands for. You should not want the intelligence community behaving in this way. It's a very serious problem because for a lot of different reasons, it's an interference in politics. It undermines national security. It's disrupting the intelligence analytical process, which is something the CIA and the intelligence community take extremely seriously. Analysis is just a big part of it because there's obviously the people going out there and collecting the raw data, but really this role of the analysts, in some ways they're the most powerful people in the intelligence community because they're actually doing the hard work of interpreting the data. So yeah, for me, I think the release of the HPSCI report, the most important document I've seen to date, and frankly, it should just change how everybody views this sordid history.
Kim Strassel: I couldn't agree with you more. And the other thing about that HPSCI report that really jumped out at me is, first of all, we know that the people who put it together worked on it for 2,300 hours. They interviewed everybody who was involved. And it's written in a very dispassionate way just as an analysis, and I think that strikes me too. It does not come across as a partisan document. It comes across as a meditation on intelligence gone wrong, and I think that's useful. I want to dive in a little bit into what it says. But before that, just to make sure listeners get the precursor to this, because I think that part is really important as well too, is the documents that Gabbard released internally from the DNI and other intel community leading up to that assessment kind of lay the groundwork. And what we find out is that prior to the election, the judgment of the career rank and file intel community was that, had Russia wanted to disrupt and cause difficulties in our election? Absolutely. They predicted that would happen. Then on December 8th, they all come together and put together this president's daily brief on what they'd actually found happened in the election, and they found, they had low confidence that maybe Russia had attempted to compromise, for instance, an Illinois voter registration database. They focused more on the fact that they knew that Russia had engaged in data leaks and hacks during the election. And they quoted, and I will quote this here, these hacks were, quote, probably intended to cause psychological effects such as undermining the credibility of the election process in candidates. And part of that big attempt to undermine the credibility included the hacks that we know against the Democratic National Committee and other party organizations. And that of course, and when you think about it in retrospect, Michael, it's a common sense and because people forget this, of course, they were interested to a certain degree in undermining Hillary Clinton because everybody thought Hillary Clinton was going to be the president And Russia would prefer to have an undermined destabilized weakened president in that regard. But that is still a world away from saying that Putin actively worked to elect Trump and colluded with him to do this. So they put this together, and then the FBI at the last minute later in the afternoon comes out and says, nope, we're not signing onto this. We're going to dissent. And DNI cancels publication of that report. And instead the very next day, Obama convenes a meeting of all of his national security principals, Brennan, Clapper, Andy McCabe at the FBI, Attorney General Loretta Lynch. And then suddenly they emerge with this new job, and it's entitled in this DNI email, POTUS tasking on Russia election meddling. And that's what leads to this January assessment. Talk a little bit about what the HPSCI report found was wrong with that assessment because that assessment came out and, in contrast to everything we'd seen beforehand, baldly said that we assess Putin and the Russian government developed a clear preference for President elect Trump, and we have high confidence in these judgments. Was that statement justified?
Michael Shellenberger: It was not. And that was another thing that did come out in that release that's super important is that the FBI and NSA said they had low confidence that it was the Russians who had hacked the Democrats because it was the DNC, but it was also John Podesta who was Hillary's campaign chair. But by the time you get to the intelligence community assessment, they say we had high confidence that it was the Russians who had done that hacking. And that turned out to be more... I had been asked about this in Congress, and I should have said I didn't know at the time because I just hadn't fully understood. But basically the firm, CrowdStrike, that had done the evaluation to decide that it was the Russians was also working for the Democrats and the FBI had never directly confirmed it..... (More at the link)
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So the Obama administration and the intelligence community and Hillary all conspired to lie to the American public then these jerks sat back and what Mueller investigate Trump and spend $40 million of the taxpayers money on a fake witch hunt. I don't ever want to hear again about how much Trumps golf costs.
