The Central Intelligence Agency manipulated intelligence information to make
it look like Russia wanted Donald Trump to win the 2016 presidential election
despite having more credible information showing that Russia wanted Hillary
Clinton to win, according to a new report.
The effort to manipulate the information was headed up by John Brennan,
Obama’s CIA director, who disregarded evidence that the Russians preferred
Clinton because she was more predictable and highlighted questionable
evidence claiming Russia favored Trump, sources told independent journalists
Matt Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger, and Alex Gutentag.
“They cooked the intelligence,” a source close to a House Permanent Select
Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) investigation into the Trump-Russia scandal
told the journalists. “They made it look like Putin supported Trump.”
The U.S. government said in January 2017 that Russia favored Trump
as president. But now, sources reveal for the first time that the CIA
"cooked the intelligence" to hide that Vladamir Putin wanted Hillary
Clinton, not Donald Trump, as president.
pic.twitter.com/WFJsW1erqb
— Michael Shellenberger (@shellenberger) February 15, 2024
The source said that the evidence pointed the other way, showing Russia
wanted Clinton to win because “it was a relationship they were comfortable
with.” According to the source, the CIA had evidence showing Russia viewed
Trump as “unreliable,” “mercurial,” and “not steady,” while viewing Clinton
as “manageable and reflecting continuity.”
HPSCI looked further into the sourcing of the claims from Brennan and the
Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) that Russia wanted Trump and found
contradictory information.
“We looked at the report and the sourcing they used to evaluate the
sourcing,” a source said. “When we dug further to look at the data available
to them that they didn’t use, and it overwhelmingly contradicted their
conclusions that Russia supported Trump.”
According to a source, Brennan and other intelligence agents “embellished”
their Trump-Russia report by changing the categorization of sources that said
Russia wanted Trump from unreliable to reliable.
Shellenberger told Fox News host Jesse Watters on Thursday that there was a
50-page report exposing the operation that the CIA “is currently hiding at
its headquarters.” According to Shellenberger, the controversy highlights two
major intelligence scandals.
“The first one happened earlier in 2016, where our sources, multiple sources,
tell us that Brennan oversaw the manipulation of our foreign allies to
basically entrap Trump associates to create the pretext for the FBI
investigation of Trump’s alleged collusion with Russia which is now
debunked,” he said.
“The second thing is almost a year later Brennan orchestrates a phony
intelligence assessment that comes to the opposite conclusion of what their
own raw intelligence, their best intelligence was showing,” he added.
Trump was reportedly preparing to declassify information on the efforts to
tie his campaign to Russia before leaving office but was unable to do so
before President Joe Biden took office.
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Let's go Brandon!