WASHINGTON — Former CIA Director John Brennan ignored warnings from “veteran” officers and ordered the publication of a “substandard” intelligence report that claimed Russian President Vladimir Putin “aspired” to help Donald Trump win the 2016 election, according to a bombshell congressional report released Wednesday.
The House Intelligence Committee had compiled the “egregious” errors by the CIA back in 2020 — errors that included burying intelligence that the Kremlin was preparing for a possible victory by Democrat Hillary Clinton, according to Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard.
The committee’s findings also show that “fabricated” information from the since-debunked Steele Dossier — funded by Clinton’s campaign and put together by an ex-MI6 spy — was crammed into the CIA product over the objections of senior officials.
“Not only did CIA Director Brennan, FBI Director [James] Comey, DNI [James] Clapper and others include the Steele Dossier in the 2017 ICA, they overruled senior Intel officials who warned them it was fabricated and should not be used,” Gabbard said, calling the move “the most egregious weaponization and politicization of intelligence in American history.”
“In doing so, they conspired to subvert the will of the American people, working with their partners in the media to promote the lie, in order to undermine the legitimacy of President Trump, essentially enacting a years-long coup against him,” she added.
“The Russia Hoax was a lie that was knowingly created by the Obama Administration to undermine the legitimacy and power of the duly elected President of the United States, Donald Trump.”
According to the House report, only a “scant, unclear, and unverifiable fragment of a sentence from one of the substandard reports constitutes the only classified information cited to suggest Putin ‘aspired’ to help Trump win.”
“CIA officers said that some of this information had been held on the orders of [Brennan], while other reporting had been judged by experienced CIA officers to have not met longstanding publication standards,” the report noted.
Other information was “unclear, of uncertain origin, potentially biased, implausible, or in the words of senior operations officers ‘odd,’” the report also stated, and was “published after the election–over the objections of veteran officers–on orders of DCIA [Brennan] and cited in the [January 2017] ICA to support claims that Putin aspired to help Trump win.”
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