OPINION:
Russian ruler Vladimir Putin most assuredly did not try to boost President Trump’s 2016 election chances against Hillary Clinton. He hated both of them.
The public record told us that back then and as it grows with new disclosures the story is the same. Mr. Putin, an enemy of America just like communist China, uses the newfangled internet to harass, disrupt, steal and lie. That’s what he did before and after 2016 and still does today.
Ask yourself, Why would he have a bias against Hillary? As secretary of state, she apologized for President George W. Bush’s rude treatment of the Kremlin for its 2008 incursion into Georgia. Clinton Foundation donors, urged by Hillary’s State Department, helped Mr. Putin build a “Silicon Valley” outside Moscow. He invaded and snatched Crimea from Ukraine without much resistance from the Obama-Biden White House.
After Mr. Trump beat Mrs. Clinton in 2016, the anti-Trump team of then-President Obama, CIA Director John O. Brennan, National Intelligence Director James R. Clapper and FBI Director James B. Comey conspired to rush an Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) into the public sphere in January 2017.
Days before Mr. Trump’s inauguration, the ICA said Mr. Putin “aspired” to help Mr. Trump. In other words, it was a conspiracy.
The common refrain is that Mr. Brennan implanted limited dossier claims into the ICA to bolster the “aspired” argument. I believe it’s the other way around. The Obama conspirators used the ICA to authenticate the dossier and its various felony allegations which would be cited in 2017 to destroy Mr. Trump.
Curated by ex-British intelligence officer Christopher Steele and financed by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee, the dossier was Mr. Comey’s chief piece of evidence to brand Mr. Trump a Moscow conspirator. There was no other evidence.
You cannot underestimate the dossier’s importance to Mr. Trump’s enemies. Its one phrase — “a well-developed conspiracy of cooperation” — drove their madness.
Before National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard began declassifying documents this summer to prove a rigged ICA, the public record already argued against a Putin, pro-Trump cyber war.
We know that Mr. Putin, as a disruptor, was hacking a lot of targets in 2016, both Democrats and Republicans, as part of an overall goal to weaken America’s faith in the democratic process.
Yes, he hacked the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign. He stole documents and they ended up posted online. Lots of outlets wrote about them, including the New York Times.
Back then, Republicans said Russia also tried to hack the Republican National Committee but failed. Moscow successfully hacked the emails of Republican figures, including former Secretary of State Colin Powell, one of the most revered men in America. The late four-star general’s emails disparaged Mr. Trump as a “national disgrace and an international pariah.”
If Mr. Putin favored Mr. Trump, why would he publish that?
Another piece of evidence: The Kremlin penetrated Mr. Steele’s source network and planted anti-Trump tales involving his attorney at the time, Michael Cohen. This is according to a declassified Justice Department Justice report. The Cohen entry — that he secretly traveled to Prague in August 2016 to meet Putin scoundrels — appeared in the dossier’s Oct. 20 chapter. (The supposed exact location was named in a subsequent chapter.)
Special counsel John Durham wrote this in his 2023 report: “FBI opened Crossfire Hurricane on July 31, 2016 … The Russians already knew about Steele’s election investigation, and there is reason to believe that even earlier in time they had access to other highly sensitive information from which the identities of Steele’s sources could have been compromised.”
If Mr. Putin “aspired” to help then-candidate Trump, why did he feed damaging info to Mr. Steele that the Clinton team and news media could have used and eventually did? The answer is, he wouldn’t.
Mr. Comey worked behind the scenes to convince Mr. Brennan to put chunks of dossier material inside the ICA. Why? So the ICA would validate the dossier he was trafficking.
Now, here is some new info that further wreaks the Obama team’s “aspired” argument.
The House Intelligence Committee Republican majority investigated the ICA in 2017 and wrote a secret report held for years by the agency.
Its findings finally came to light July 23, when Ms. Gabbard declassified and released it to further prove that Mr. Obama ordered the ICA creation in a “treasonous conspiracy.”
The House report quoted the ICA as saying, “We assess that [Russian intelligence] conducted cyber operations against targets associated with the 2016 U.S. presidential election including targets associated with both major U.S. political parties.”
The secret ICA also said, “We have no reporting on whether Moscow collected similarly damaging Republican Party-related information.”
But wait. That’s not what the public version said when it was released on Jan. 6, 2017. That version read: “Russia collected on some Republican-affiliated targets but did not conduct a comparable disclosure campaign.”
In other words, the Obama team implied to the public that Russia had dirt on Mr. Trump but chose not to release it when it really didn’t know what Moscow had collected.
The Obama team’s folly was further exposed.
The House committee staff found that the “aspired” assertion basically came from one partial text message from a human source who got the information from a sub-source.
The committee wrote, “The significance of this fragment to the ICA case that Putin ‘aspired’ for candidate Trump to win cannot be overstated. The major ‘high confidence’ judgment of the ICA rests on one opinion about a text fragment with uncertain meaning, that may be a garble, and for which it is not clear how it was obtained.”
The report said CIA professionals protested the “aspired” description, citing the ambiguous text. But Mr. Brennan overruled them.
Keep this in mind: Messrs. Brennan and Clapper, the ICA inventors, are so politically driven that they joined 49 other ex-intelligence officials in October 2020 in signing a letter that falsely said the leaked Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation.
With the Biden-Trump election then just days away, their goal in their own disinformation campaign was to kill the New York Post’s laptop story. In other words, they actually did “aspire” to help Mr. Biden.
As for the dossier, we all know today that the Clinton team circulated a hoax and the assertion of a “well-developed conspiracy of cooperation.” The dossier source for that allegation made up his source, the Durham report said.
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Rick Crawford, Arkansas Republican, said the CIA kept the 2017 staff report in the dark for seven years. In early July, Rep. Crawford sent a letter to President Trump urging its release.
“It documents efforts within the CIA to manufacture the Trump-Russia collusion narrative and must not be locked away indefinitely,” he wrote.
• Rowan Scarborough is a columnist with The Washington Times.
