WASHINGTON — Attorney General Pam Bondi launched a “strike force” late Wednesday to investigate newly declassified intelligence findings that the Obama administration’s probe of Russian influence on the 2016 election was deeply flawed.
Bondi announced that the Department of Justice will review all the evidence compiled by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard about the “substandard” intelligence in the probe — including “fabricated” information from the now-debunked dossier peddled by MI6 spy Christopher Steele.
“The Department of Justice is proud to work with my friend Director Gabbard and we are grateful for her partnership in delivering accountability for the American people,” the AG said.
“We will investigate these troubling disclosures fully and leave no stone unturned to deliver justice.”
The FBI earlier this month initiated an investigation into former CIA Director John Brennan and ex-FBI Director James Comey for any potential criminal actions taken as part of the Trump-Russia probe.
CIA Director John Ratcliffe previously handed over additional evidence to the DOJ about Brennan’s botched assessment, confirming other lapses in intelligence gathering for that probe, which was ordered by former President Barack Obama during a Dec. 9, 2016, Oval Office meeting.
On Wednesday, Gabbard released a long-anticipated, 44-page report from the House Intelligence Committee that found “egregious” errors committed by Brennan in the compiling of an assessment that claimed Moscow preferred a Trump victory over Democrat Hillary Clinton.
Tulsi Gabbard’s Russiagate claims
Tulsi Gabbard’s claims of election interference focus on the controversial 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment, which former president Barack Obama ordered his intel chiefs to compile.
The report fueled the Russiagate investigations against President Trump. Gabbard alleges it amounted to a political hit-job, claiming Obama officials knowingly used shaky intel and then lied about it.
Gabbard’s new claims are based on a 2020 House Intelligence Committee report, which she has publicly released. Its findings differ in some key ways from both the Obama report and a previously released Senate Intelligence Committee report.
Democrats, however, point to the Senate report, which was backed by then-Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) — now Trump’s secretary of state. That supports some of the findings of the Obama report.
Here are the biggest points — and what the dueling intel reports say:
The Steele Dossier
- The House report contradicts the claims of Obama officials that they never relied on the discredited Steele Dossier — which was compiled by Hillary Clinton’s campaign — as part of the Russiagate investigation.
- In a 2017 House hearing, Obama’s CIA director John Brennan denied that his agency used the Steele dossier for intelligence assessments.
- However, the full Steele Dossier was still included as an attachment to the Obama intel report, the newly public House report found
- Additionally, according to the House report, Brennan, FBI Director James Comey and deputy director Andrew McCabe pushed to use the Steele dossier for the Obama intel report
- Senior intel officials also confronted Brennan about the legitimacy of the Steele Dossier, the House report said, but he shrugged it off. Brennan’s response was reportedly, “Yes, but doesn’t it ring true?”
- The Senate investigation found that the Steele Dossier was not used as part of the Obama intel report
Obama’s involvement
- Gabbard claimed Wednesday that Obama ordered the creation of the 2017 intel report and suggested it “was subject to unusual directives directly from the president and senior political appointees.” She added: “Obama directed an intelligence community assessment to be created, to further this contrived false narrative that ultimately led to a year-long coup to try to undermine President Trump’s presidency.”
- The 2020 Senate intel report confirmed that Obama ordered the report to be drafted, but did not comment on the political motivations.
- Obama said, “the bizarre allegations are ridiculous and a weak attempt at distraction.”
Did Putin want Trump to win?
- The Obama report said that “Russia’s goals were to undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability” and that Putin had a “clear preference for President-elect Trump.”
- But the House report contradicted this, saying that Putin’s “principal motivations in these operations were to undermine faith in the US democratic process.” The Russian strongman also seemed to expect Clinton to win, and held back on “some compromising material for post-election use against the expected Clinton administration.”
- The Senate report said that lawmakers were given “specific intelligence reporting to support the assessment that Putin and the Russian Government demonstrated a preference for candidate Trump.”
Did Russia alter the 2016 election?
- To buttress her claims that the Obama intel report was political interference, she highlighted the findings of multiple intelligence agencies that Russia “had neither the intent nor capability to impact the outcome of the US election.”
- On this, all three reports are in agreement
The report, begun by former House intel chair Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) and completed in September 2020, showed Brennan disregarded warnings from “veteran” CIA officers and chose to include a “scant, unclear, and unverifiable fragment of a sentence from one of the substandard reports constitutes the only classified information cited to suggest [Russian President Vladimir] Putin ‘aspired’ to help Trump win.”
Brennan and Comey also pushed for the Steele dossier — which had been funded by the Democratic National Committee and Clinton’s campaign — to be included in the January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) on the Kremlin’s actions amid the presidential contest.
When confronted by the senior officers about the dossier failing to meet “basic tradecraft standards,” the CIA honcho reportedly said, “Yes, but doesn’t it ring true?”
Other findings kept out of the ICA assessment also cut against the narrative that Putin wanted Trump to win — and in fact, point to the Russian strongman preparing for a Clinton victory.
“Putin’s principal motivations in these operations were to undermine faith in the US democratic process and to weaken what the Russians considered to be an inevitable Clinton presidency,” the report stated.
Russia’s foreign intelligence service, the SVR, further “possessed DNC communications that Clinton was suffering from ‘intensified psycho-emotional problems, including uncontrolled fits of anger, aggression, and cheerfulness,’” but didn’t disclose it.
Neither did the SVR leak that the former secretary of state was “on a daily regimen of ‘heavy tranquilizers’ and while afraid of losing, she remained ‘obsessed with a thirst for power.’”
The Kremlin’s intel service also held back “a campaign email discussing a plan approved by Secretary Clinton to link Putin and Russian hackers to candidate Trump in order to ‘distract the [American] public’ from the Clinton email server scandal.”
The 2017 ICA sparked accusations of purported Russian collusion with Trump’s presidential campaign to win the White House — with high-profile reports by special counsels Robert Mueller and John Durham ultimately debunking the narrative.
“Not only did CIA Director Brennan, FBI Director Comey, DNI [James] Clapper and others include the Steele Dossier in the 2017 ICA, they overruled senior Intel officials who warned them it was fabricated and should not be used,” Gabbard said.
“In doing so, they conspired to subvert the will of the American people, working with their partners in the media to promote the lie, in order to undermine the legitimacy of President Trump, essentially enacting a years-long coup against him,” she added, calling it “the most egregious weaponization and politicization of intelligence in American history.”
House Intelligence Committee chairman Rick Crawford (R-Ark.) gave the 2020 report to the CIA, ODNI and White House in March, revealing in a statement Wednesday that he and his predecessor had to endure “untold levels of obstruction by the CIA” to ultimately release the information to the public.
It’s unclear which officials have been identified in Gabbard’s criminal referral to the DOJ, but Clapper told CNN Wednesday night that he’s already lawyered up. The Post reached out to reps for Brennan and Comey for comment.
“It’s criminal at the highest level,” Trump erupted Tuesday in the Oval Office after Gabbard disclosed the 44th president’s high-level meeting with the spy chiefs. “He’s guilty … This was treason, this was every word you could think of. They tried to steal the election. They tried to obfuscate the election.”
“Out of respect for the office of the presidency, our office does not normally dignify the constant nonsense and misinformation flowing out of this White House with a response. But these claims are outrageous enough to merit one,” said Patrick Rodenbush, a spokesman for Obama, in a statement Tuesday.
“These bizarre allegations are ridiculous and a weak attempt at distraction,” Rodenbush also said.
Democrats — including Senate Intelligence Committee ranking member Mark Warner — have dismissed that any of Gabbard’s findings revealed a sinister plot by the Obama administration, pointing to a 2020 bipartisan report that concluded Russia intended to help Trump’s campaign in 2016.
“Nothing in this partisan, previously scuttled document changes that,” Warner (D-Va.) said Wednesday.
“Releasing this so-called report is just another reckless act by a Director of National Intelligence so desperate to please Donald Trump that she is willing to risk classified sources, betray our allies, and politicize the very intelligence she has been entrusted to protect.”
The Senate intel report was unanimously signed off on by every member of the panel, including then-Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), now Trump’s secretary of state.
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