Former top intelligence officials were aware that “Russian collusion” was a hoax cooked up by Hillary Clinton during the 2016 presidential election, but tried to cook up another scheme blaming Russia to help Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election, recently released reports show.
Special Counsel John Durham’s final report released last week revealed that back in late July 2016, the intelligence community received intelligence that Clinton planned to “vilify” Trump by linking him to Russia to distract from her private server woes. The intelligence was so “significant” that then-CIA Director John Brennan briefed it to President Obama and then-Vice President Joe Biden and others at the White House on July 28, 2016, just days after receiving it.
Durham’s report said the next morning, on July 29, 2016, Brennan briefed then-FBI Director James Comey on the White House meeting, and that after he spoke with Comey and then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, he and other CIA officials tried to limit the spread of the Clinton plan intelligence.
Durham wrote:
Immediately after communicating with the President, Comey, and Clapper to discuss relevant intelligence, Director Brennan and other agency officials took steps to ensure that dissemination of intelligence related to Russia’s election interference efforts, including the Clinton Plan intelligence, would be limited to protect sensitive information and prevent leaks.
Brennan stated that the inter-agency Fusion Cell, a team to synthesize and analyze pertinent intelligence on Russian malign influence activities related to the presidential election, was put in motion after his meeting with President Obama on July 28th. Email traffic and witness interviews conducted by the Office reflect that at least some CIA personnel believed that the Clinton Plan intelligence led to the decision being made to set up the Fusion Cell.
Despite this intelligence, the FBI launched an investigation into the Trump campaign, which then morphed into a special counsel investigation. Clinton’s involvement in the hoax was unknown until October 2017, when then-House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-CA) uncovered Clinton’s involvement in creating the “pee dossier” that claimed collusion between Trump and Russia.
However, Brennan and Clapper continued to perpetuate the hoax up through 2019, and then in 2020, helped cook up a new scheme to help Biden win the 2020 presidential election by claiming the New York Post’s bombshell Hunter Biden laptop story was Russian disinformation.
According to the recently released report by the House Judiciary Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, Brennan and Clapper were intimately involved in crafting a statement for the public suggesting that the Post’s story was Russian disinformation just weeks before the 2020 election.
The committee’s report revealed that then-Biden campaign adviser Antony Blinken had contacted former Deputy CIA Director Michael Morell after the Post’s story broke. Morell testified to the committee that Blinken’s call triggered him to write a statement suggesting the story was Russian disinformation even though there was no evidence of that.
Morell then reached out to other former intelligence officials, including Brennan and Clapper, to get them to sign the statement to give it more “power.”
Morell wrote to Brennan on October 19, 2020, that his intentions were to “give the [Biden] campaign, particularly during the debate on Thursday, a talking point to push back on [President] Trump on this issue.” Brennan signed the statement.
Clapper even offered Morell advice to “strengthen the verbiage.”
After reviewing the draft statement on October 18, 2020, Clapper wrote Morell that he would “gladly sign on,” having “said as much [about the Hunter Biden laptop and emails] on CNN Friday evening.” Clapper added, “I think it would strengthen the verbiage if you say this has all the classic earmarks of a Soviet/Russian information operation rather than the ‘feel’ of a Russian operation.”
Morell responded to Clapper that his “editorial suggestion has been made,” and that “It was a good one.”
Ultimately, 51 former intelligence officials signed on to the statement. That statement was then shopped to media outlets, with the guidance of the Biden campaign. After the Washington Post and the Associated Press did not bite, Politico‘s Natasha Bertrand published the statement, giving Biden a talking point during a debate with Trump to claim the story was Russian disinformation.
And after receiving requests from Congress earlier this year to testify and provide documents, Brennan then emailed other signatories that he would voice his “strong opposition to such political tactics,” and asserted that complying with the Committee’s request for documents and testimony “would serve as a precedent that [Chairman Jordan] and others could seek to leverage when making frivolous requests of other former intelligence officials in the future.”
After the release of their report, the Weaponization Committee called in both Brennan and Clapper to testify earlier this month.
“Today’s interview draws into sharp relief the extent to which the effort to discredit the damning information on Hunter Biden’s laptop was hyper-political, organized by former national security leaders, and coerced by people who were working at the CIA at that time,” Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL), who sits on the committee, said in a statement after Brennan’s closed-door testimony earlier this month.
The committee’s next steps are unclear.
Miranda Devine, who along with Breitbart News’ Political Editor Emma-Jo Morris revealed the existence of the Hunter Biden laptop for the Post, said recently on Fox News, “This is something for the next Republican president to urgently clean out FBI, CIA, these deep state security agencies. They are a clear and present danger to American citizens.”
“They have turned the weapons that were used against our enemies overseas — they have now turned them on Americans,” she said.
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