Obama’s Lie to Sink Trump: The Truth Comes Out
It Was Never About Russia. It Was Always About Trump
Another day, another release of a trove of declassified documents regarding the infamous Intelligence Community Assessment that Vladimir Putin interfered with the 2016 election specifically to elect his BFF Donald Trump.
Another day, another release of a trove of declassified documents charting Barack Obama’s direct involvement in the creation of that execrably politicized bit of “intelligence”—exactly what Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard had said would be coming.
The first document dump laid the foundation that the Russia Collusion Hoax unleashed by the ICA was a criminal conspiracy by members of the outgoing Obama Administration against then-incoming President Donald Trump.
The Russian Collusion Hoax can now be called a criminal conspiracy because we are now faced with evidence that the outgoing Obama Administration—at the direct instruction of Barack Obama himself—ignored months of intelligence community analysis concluding that Russia was not seeking corrupt influence over US elections to fabricate an official “assessment” asserting the exact opposite.
This latest document dump builds on that foundation, presumably moving the case for criminality past the “probable cause” stage and towards the “beyond a reasonable doubt” threshold. As DNI Gabbard stated yesterday on X:
New evidence has emerged of the most egregious weaponization and politicization of intelligence in American history. Per President @realDonaldTrump's directive, I have declassified a @HouseIntel oversight majority staff report that exposes how the Obama Administration manufactured the January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment that they knew was false, promoting the LIE that Vladimir Putin and the Russian government helped President Trump win the 2016 election.
The power of Tulsi Gabbard’s argument lies in its simplicity: Barack Obama organized a conspiracy to undermine Donald Trump’s first term by promoting blatant lies about Russia “hacking” the 2016 election and Donald Trump “colluding” with Russia.
The danger of Tulsi Gabbard’s argument is that once again she brings receipts.
The corporate media mouthpieces are of course choosing to pan and dismiss Tulsi Gabbard’s allegations.
Writing on MSNBC.com, Steve Benen, producer of “The Rachel Maddow Show”, pronounced the Trump Administration’s naming of Barack Obama “stark raving mad.”
At a Tuesday morning event in the Oval Office, the Republican incumbent explicitly endorsed the Justice Department targeting Barack Obama, suggesting that the former Democratic president is "guilty" as part of a scheme that Trump considers "treason."
Moments earlier, the current president, apparently indifferent to reality, added that "it’s time to go after people" and Obama "has been caught directly." Trump went on to describe the former Democratic president as "the ringleader."
At the same event, the Republican said that his administration found "proof" that Obama was "seditious" and "trying to lead a coup."
All of this was stark raving mad — there is no such "proof" — though Trump has been working his way to this point for a while. Ten days ago, for example, he published an odd missive in which he said Obama was at least partially responsible for “creating” the Jeffrey Epstein files, which was bonkers for a variety of reasons, not the least of which was that former Democratic president had already been out of office for years when the Trump administration investigated, arrested and charged the late millionaire pedophile.
If we follow this narrative, we must conclude that Gabbard’s document dumps do not show what she says they show—that DNI Gabbard is either lying to us or is an idiot, and Steve Benen’s previous MSNBC.com screed left little doubt what he thought of her.
By all appearances, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has been struggling for months. On Capitol Hill, she’s become the subject of bipartisan ridicule, with one Republican senator recently questioning whether she should be medicated.
MSNBC also gave former Director of Central Intelligence John Brennan a platform from which to mock and dismiss Tulsi Gabbard.
Here we are again, Nicole. It is unsurprising, very troubling, and very dangerous. As Representative Haines said, the person who leads our intelligence community today would put out something like this that just mischaracterizes and misrepresents, in a wholesale manner, what the intelligence community did during the 2016 run-up to the presidential election. Again, the misrepresentations just are ludicrous. When I read through the material, it reminded me of sort of a third-rate lawyer who realizes she has nothing to defend her client and is going to put together an absurd brief that's laughable on its face.
There is an extremely obvious and perverse irony to Brennan accusing Tulsi Gabbard of making an “absurd” case against senior Obama Administration personnel, which is that Brennan was perhaps the primary actor in crafting a demonstrably absurd ICA that was laughable on its face when it was first made public in 2017.
For its part, the New York Times promoted a banal logical fallacy (the appeal to authority) to carp at Gabbard’s blunt rhetoric.
Attacking the conclusions of the 2016 assessment that Russia sought to denigrate Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee, and boost Mr. Trump has been a hobby horse of some of the president’s supporters. Republicans have long taken particular aim at the idea that the Kremlin favored Mr. Trump, arguing instead that Russia was simply trying to sow chaos or undermine democratic institutions.
The attacks on the documents have intensified in recent weeks as first the C.I.A. and then Ms. Gabbard’s office have raised questions about the effort.
Bipartisan Senate reviews have validated the C.I.A.’s work in 2016, and John H. Durham, a special prosecutor appointed by Attorney General William P. Barr during Mr. Trump’s first term, also failed to find any evidence undermining the intelligence agencies’ conclusions.
Tulsi Gabbard’s allegations are nothing but pro-Trump talking points, we are told, because the Russia Collusion narrative had already been “proven” to be real.
That stance, however, completely ignores the controversy which surrounded the complete collapse of the Russia Collusion narrative in the wake of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s highly predictable failure to prove that Donald Trump in fact colluded with Russia.
What the New York Times counts now as conclusive proof was considered then as anything but.
Corporate media largely concludes that Tulsi Gabbard must be wrong in her allegations because she is Donald Trump’s Director of National Intelligence. Tulsi Gabbard must be wrong simply because Trump.
Yet corporate media has the same problem defending Barack Obama and his intelligence chiefs now as it did with the Russia Collusion Hoax then: the facts keep contradicting their narrative.
The core of yesterday’s document dump is the declassified report of the House Intelligence Committee from 2020 detailing the numerous shortcomings of the 2017 ICA. While the report is the product of House Republicans, its factual assertions leave little room for debate about the true nature of the ICA.
One prime example: veteran CIA officers testified that then-DCI John Brennan overruled their professional judgement to incorporate into the ICA information that was at best “questionable”.
This use of questionable material in formulating the ICA is not merely problematic as a matter of logic and common sense. It is also a violation of the standards the nation’s intelligence agencies are supposed to use when evaluating raw intelligence and extrapolating various analyses and assessments.
As numerous other independent media sources have pointed out, these failures to adhere to established standards and protocols were the direct consequence of instructions given by then-President Barack Obama.
As Aaron Mate of RealClearInvestigations highlights, the crafting of the ICA at multiple junctures hinged on John Brennan’s intentional disregard for the professional opinions of multiple veteran CIA analysts.
Gabbard’s material adds to a body of evidence previously reported by RealClearInvestigations that challenges the widely parroted claim about the quality of evidence and the extent of Russian “interference operations” in the 2016 election. These conclusions – based on questionable assertions presented as hard facts – have been falsely portrayed as an intelligence consensus. When Trump, the nation’s commander-in-chief, cast doubt on the Russian interference allegations in a July 2018 news conference, former CIA chief John Brennan denounced him as “nothing short of treasonous.”
It turns out that Trump was not out of sync with the U.S. intelligence community he was accused of betraying.
Brennan’s actions are indisputably a weaponization of the US intelligence community against Donald Trump, as he—at Barack Obama’s direction—manipulated intelligence community work products to construct a pre-determined narrative. What emerges from the HSPCI report is that Brennan’s criteria for incorporating raw intelligence into the ICA was whether or not it could be used to further a narrative of Russian collusion, not whether the information was accurate, factual, and reliable. Brennan sacrificed truth for the sake of that narrative.
Especially troubling is how, according to the HSPCI report, Brennan sought to suppress publication of various pieces of information, thus preventing the establishment of a clear intelligence community consensus on that information.
Note that this is not a manufactured allegation by House Republicans on the Intelligence Committee. This is an assertion by multiple CIA officers about the conduct of their boss, John Brennan.
I will note that much of the material I write here for All Facts Matter is specifically intended to act as an information marker, establishing what is publicly known about a matter at a particular point in time, as well as my contemporaneous assessment and understanding of that information. That is what documentation does: it establishes the historical record and a baseline for all future research. That is how documentation provides context and nuance—two essential elements of all analytical efforts in every knowledge domain.
John Brennan intentionally sought to suppress efforts to establish such a baseline for the materials which went into the 2017 ICA. That is the type of corrupt activity that leaves little doubt as to Brennan’s corrupt motives, and forces us to conclude that the Intelligence Community Assessment was fraudulent, a deliberate fabrication by John Brennan at the behest of Barack Obama.
In one sense, this latest document dump from the ODNI is anti-climactic, as it merely confirms that the Russia Collusion Hoax was exactly that—a hoax. This is, of course not news to myself nor to the legion of other independent journalists who have covered the hoax from its inception.
Just as it was clear when the 2017 ICA was published that it was Fake News, it was clear throughout all the efforts by Congressional Democrats to somehow “prove” Russian Collusion that no such collusion ever took place. There simply was never any good evidence that Vladimir Putin sought to get Donald Trump elected President.
With so many having already established that the Russia Collusion Hoax was a load of horse hockey, Tulsi Gabbard’s declassified documents cannot add much to the discussion. Russia Collusion was a lie, and many already knew—and had already proven—that it was a lie.
What Tulsi Gabbard is revealing, however, is the explicit instruction set commanding that lie which emanated from the White House in the waning days of the Obama Administration. Barack Obama played a formative role in the Russian Collusion Hoax that dogged Donald Trump throughout his first term. Obama’s efforts led directly to Robert Mueller’s Special Counsel investigation, as well as President Trump’s first impeachment.
Those efforts can now clearly be placed in a context of what Tulsi Gabbard has called a “years long coup” against Donald Trump’s Presidency. They are part of a fabric of corruption that has expanded to include the 2020 election controversies which served as catalyst to the J6 riots. Those same election controversies led to the election of a demonstrably senile Joe Biden.
The progression of Biden’s dementia would produce the still metastasizing autopen scandal.
This fabric of corruption makes “Obamagate” not thus just historical fact but present reality. The “years long coup” is still ongoing. Undermining Donald Trump’s Presidency is not just something Barack Obama and the Democrats attempted to do; it is something Barack Obama and the Democrats are still attempting to do even now.
Seven years ago I posed the question “What crime has anyone found against President Trump?”
In the wake of Tulsi Gabbard’s document dumps, we now have the question “How many crimes can we prove against Barack Obama and his intelligence minions?”
The grim, disturbing answer is “several…and counting.”
I think this is historic. To have the Democrats obviously attempting to destroy an elected President with the cooperation of the CIA, FBI, and the legacy media is unprecedented and a National scandal.
I believe it goes on with the ICE violent riots. Financed by whom?
Thank Peter
I believe Tulsi