John Brennan, the disgraced former Obama CIA Director, could have opened himself as much as perjury expenses after a brand new e-mail was uncovered in a scathing inside evaluation by CIA profession professionals into the company’s 2016 Trump-Russia collusion evaluation.
Brennan is known to be beneath renewed scrutiny by authorities over discrepancies between his sworn testimony to federal investigations and his written orders to underlings conducting the Intelligence Group Evaluation commissioned by then-president Barack Obama in December 2016 that discovered Russia interfered within the 2016 presidential election to assist Donald Trump.
The evaluation, declassified final week, discovered that Brennan insisted on the inclusion of the discredited Steele File, over the robust objections of the CIA’s two most senior Russia specialists who stated it “did not meet even the most basic tradecraft standards.”
The then CIA Deputy Director for Evaluation (DDA) David Cohen warned in an e-mail to Brennan on December 29 that together with the file in any kind risked “the credibility of the entire paper.”
However Brennan “formalized his position in writing, stating that ‘my bottom line is that I believe that the information warrants inclusion in the report.’ ”
The Steele File was a tawdry opposition analysis doc written by a former British spy Christopher Steele and paid for by the Hillary Clinton marketing campaign. It contained quite a few made-up claims, together with the ridiculous lie that Trump, a famend germaphobe, had paid prostitutes to urinate on a mattress in a Moscow resort room. The 2023 particular counsel Durham report acknowledged that “the FBI was not able to corroborate a single allegation contained in the Steele Report.”
Final week’s CIA evaluation by the deputy director of research discovered that when Brennan was “confronted with specific flaws in the Dossier by the two [Russia] mission center leaders — one with extensive operational experience and the other with a strong analytic background — he appeared more swayed by the Dossier’s general conformity with existing theories than by legitimate tradecraft concerns.”
The choice to incorporate the Steele File within the evaluation “ran counter to fundamental tradecraft principles and ultimately undermined the credibility of a key judgment.”
A abstract of the file was included in an annex to the ICA however a reference was additionally included “in the main body of the ICA as the fourth supporting bullet for the judgment that Putin ‘aspired’ to help Trump win,” the evaluation discovered.
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Together with the file reference in the principle physique of the ICA “implicitly elevated unsubstantiated claims to the status of credible supporting evidence, compromising the analytical integrity of the judgment.”
By forcing the file into the ICA, the virulently anti-Trump Brennan additionally elevated the credibility of the vile fictional smear sheet which he had been buying to Democratic leaders and the press throughout the 2016 election marketing campaign.
The Assessment discovered that former FBI director James Comey additionally insisted on the file’s inclusion within the ICA. “FBI leadership made it clear that their participation in the ICA hinged on the Dossier’s inclusion and, over the next few days, repeatedly pushed to weave references to it throughout the main body of the ICA.”
But in congressional testimony beneath oath on Could 23, 2017, Brennan claimed the Steele File “wasn’t part of the corpus of intelligence information that we had. It was not in any way used as a basis for the Intelligence Community Assessment that was done.”
Now we all know that’s not true. The Steele File was pressured into the ICA by Brennan and it appeared not simply within the “annex” however was referenced in the principle physique of the ICA that ended up triggering the Mueller Particular Counsel investigation that crippled the primary two years of Trump’s first time period and served to delegitimize his 2016 election victory.
Brennan continued to play harmless in numerous media interviews, together with these he was paid for as an MSNBC contributor. In 2018 he advised NBC’s “Meet the Press” that he first heard “just snippets about” the Steele File within the “late summer of 2016.”
