Fox News’ Ed Henry reported Tuesday evening that Acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell has declassified information calling into question the conclusion that Russia interfered in the 2016 election to help Donald Trump.
Henry told Tucker Carlson on Tucker Carlson Tonight that the new information would suggest that John Brennan, who headed the Central Intelligence Agency under President Barack Obama, “also had intel saying, actually, Russia wanted Hillary Clinton to win because she was a known quantity, she had been secretary of state, and Vladimir Putin’s team thought she was more malleable, while candidate Donald Trump was unpredictable.”
Former National Security Council chief of staff Fred Fleitz made a similar claim in an article on FoxNews.com April 22:
House Intelligence Committee staff told me that after an exhaustive investigation reviewing intelligence and interviewing intelligence officers, they found that Brennan suppressed high-quality intelligence suggesting that Putin actually wanted the more predictable and malleable Clinton to win the 2016 election.
Instead, the Brennan team included low-quality intelligence that failed to meet intelligence community standards to support the political claim that Russian officials wanted Trump to win, House Intelligence Committee staff revealed. They said that CIA analysts also objected to including that flawed, substandard information in the assessment.
On Tuesday, Henry said that he had obtained independent confirmation of the claims made by Fleitz in that report.
For three years, the received wisdom in Washington has been that 17 intelligence agencies concluded that Russia had interfered in the election to help Trump win. It then transpired that only four agencies had actually been involved.
The Senate Intelligence Committee, chaired by embattled Republican Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC), issued a report last month that appeared to confirm the work of the intelligence agencies.
However, that conclusion may soon be contradicted.
President Trump has accepted the claim that Russia interfered in the election — though he does not believe Russia actually helped him win, and he has publicly cast doubt on the idea that Russia preferred him over Clinton, his Democratic rival.
Breitbart News noted in 2017: “[T]he Russians may just as well have preferred Hillary Clinton, who had given Russia everything it wanted while serving as President Barack Obama’s Secretary of State — from the ill-fated “reset,” to a surrender of U.S. missile defenses in Eastern Europe, to the sale of 20% of America’s uranium reserves to a Russian company closely tied to the Russian state.”
“This could be a bombshell,” Henry told Carlson on Tuesday.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). His new book, RED NOVEMBER, is available for pre-order. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.