After reading this analysis piece in the NY Times I felt like I just wanted to tap this two month old post of mine and send it to author Charlie Savage. Savage has written a story about the recent release of new documents by DNI Tulsi Gabbard about the push to get the intelligence community to conclude that Russia wanted Trump to win the election. It’s titled “New Reports on Russian Interference Don’t Show What Trump Says They Do” but the subhead has a lot more nuance: “The administration’s claims are overblown, but newly declassified information provides some messy details about a January 2017 intelligence assessment of Moscow’s election interference.”
Those messy details are quite messy Savage admits, but he still bends over backwards to give partisan Democrats every benefit of the doubt.
…even if the administration’s use of the reports is wildly overstated, some of the information has not been made public before. It provides some messy details about how the intelligence community assessment was hurriedly produced during Mr. Obama’s final months in office…
Their case seeking to undermine the assessment has focused on the unusually rushed and tightly controlled process to complete the document, in which senior leaders like John O. Brennan, the C.I.A. director, and James B. Comey, the F.B.I. director, played a more direct role than is typical.
Comey and Brennan were in a hurry and hence they did some unusual things. Well, that’s one possible explanation. Another is that these partisan hacks were hoping to keep their jobs after Hillary won the election and instead Trump won and spoiled their plans. Are these guys hardcore partisans? Here’s how NPR (not a conservative news outlet) reported on Brennan back in 2018:
Former CIA Director John Brennan is out of the agency but not the public eye. He’s made a point of attacking President Trump ever since his Inauguration. Critics say that can sow discord, but Brennan says he’s doing what he thinks is right…
JOHN BRENNAN: I am a nonpartisan. I’ve worked for Democratic and Republican presidents, and I’ve admired and respected all the ones that I’ve worked for. And I always felt that they were trying to do what was best for the United States. Mr. Trump is a very different person from anybody in my memory that was elected president of the United States.
And the things that I said, I stand behind them. I think he is dishonest. He lacks integrity. He has very questionable ethics and morality. And he views the world through a prism of how it’s going to help Donald Trump. And I just think that he has not fulfilled the responsibilities of the president of the United States office.
Whether you agree with Brennan’s take or not, there’s no doubt that he has a real problem with Trump, one that led to him taking the unusual step of attacking the then-current president without end since the inauguration. Is it really so hard to believe the same guy may have had the same feelings prior to the inauguration? It is for Charlie Savage.
In early December 2016, after Mr. Trump’s surprise victory, Mr. Obama directed the intelligence community to produce a comprehensive analysis of Russia’s election meddling, drawing on all available sources of information. The terms of that mandate appear to have led the top officials overseeing the process to include material that might otherwise have been excluded…
Mr. Brennan has publicly said the Steele dossier material was not incorporated or used in the assessment itself because of the C.I.A.’s concerns. In 2017, he told Congress that the dossier “was not in any way used as a basis for the intelligence community assessment that was done.”
The newly disclosed material complicates that narrative. For one, it showed that Mr. Brennan internally defended appending a summary of the dossier to the assessment after C.I.A. analysts resisted the compromise, too.
So it’s pretty clear that Brennan lied and intentionally misled people about his own position. Instead of refusing to use the partisan dossier (an attempt at an October surprise by the Clinton campaign) Brennan actually overruled people in his own agency to ensure it was included.
Usually, lying like this might cause journalists to start wondering why you were lying or who else involved might be lying and, most importantly, why they are lying. But this analysis just skips right over all of that. All Savage will say is that it “complicates the narrative” which is the most anodyne way possible to say someone lied and got caught.
Similarly, Savage doesn’t deny that all of this seems to have been directed by then-President Obama, which is precisely what Trump and Gabbard have been claiming. The only difference is that Savage refuses to entertain the possibility that that was anything more than a result of bureaucratic haste.
Mr. Obama’s mandate to take account of all available information also led the C.I.A. to draw upon some raw intelligence that it might otherwise not have seen fit to publish, or disseminate for analysts to use.
The newly disclosed material shows that after Mr. Obama’s direction, Mr. Brennan ordered a “full review,” including the publication of any relevant intelligence that had been collected before the election but not disseminated.
The C.I.A. then published 15 additional reports containing raw intelligence it had previously gathered. Three became support for the assessment’s judgment that Mr. Putin’s motives included wanting to bolster Mr. Trump’s chances of winning the election…
The most important of them was something the U.S. mole in the Kremlin had said: that Mr. Putin made public the hacked Democratic emails after deciding that Mr. Trump, “whose victory Putin was counting on, most likely would not be able to pull off a convincing victory.”
The 2020 House committee report said the statement had originally not been disseminated because analysts were not sure what the mole had meant or who specifically the mole had heard that from. The report criticized the assessment for interpreting that phrase to mean Mr. Putin hoped Mr. Trump would win, without flagging that its reading was disputed.
Separately, a review of the procedures and analytic tradecraft that went into the assessment, commissioned by John Ratcliffe, Mr. Trump’s current C.I.A. director, argued that the C.I.A. and the F.B.I. should not have put the judgment that Mr. Putin was trying to help Mr. Trump at “high confidence” when only one source explicitly and directly backed that finding.
They had one well-placed source who gave one statement from an unknown person or possibly a conclusion based on unknown information. Thanks to Obama’s order to flood the zone with Russia election information, this was turned into proof Putin wanted Obama to win and jumped to the level of “high confidence.”
Again, the possibility that maybe, just maybe, some of the partisans who’d just lost the election were looking to leave a ticking bomb on the incoming president’s doorstep is never entertained. None of the lying or strange behavior needs to be explained. Mistakes were made and they all just happened to be detrimental to president-elect Trump.
If this were all seen in isolation, maybe this kind of soft take would be somewhat plausible. But in light of the way Obama’s people went after Gen. Michael Flynn for his contacts with the Russian ambassador during the transition and the fact that the Steele dossier and the Alfa Bank story were clearly attempts at an October surprise by the Clinton campaign meant to discredit Trump by connecting him to Russia. Add the fact that inclusion of the dossier in a briefing led to the entire Clinton-funded oppo-dump landing on front pages around the world without it ever being fact-checked. Add in the fact that the FBI had lied to the FISA court to secure a wiretap on a Trump administration figure. Add in those texts inside the FBI about having an insurance policy in the form of an Russia collusion investigation in case Trump wins. And also add in the fact that Democrats never stopped pushing this empty narrative for at least two years of Trump’s first term.
Put it all together and maybe at some point a decent reporter might want to ask, or at least ponder for a moment, how many of these rushed judgements and outright lies by people like Brennan, Comey and Obama were really mistakes and how many were calculated efforts to hobble Trump’s administration before he could even take office. Maybe someday the NY Times will get there but it is not this day.
