The HPSCI report proves indispensable for understanding what supposed intel Obama withheld from the intelligence community under the guise of executive privilege.
Documents released over the last month have exposed a post-election plot designed to derail President Donald Trump’s first term. The recently declassified material reveals former President Barack Obama sought to continue the Russia-collusion hoax Hillary Clinton had launched during the presidential campaign by directing select members of his intelligence community to craft the deceptive Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) on Russia’s efforts to influence the 2016 election. However, a close reading of these documents reveals Obama holds even more culpability than previously discussed.
However, the recently declassified HPSCI report also revealed a more subtle — but equally significant — detail, namely Obama’s role in hiding intel from the analysts responsible for drafting the ICA.
“Investigators as well as the ICA authors were denied access to a trove of information on grounds of executive or congressional privilege,” the HPSCI report explained. According to the report, one FBI analyst argued the intel should be shared with analysts, but “that the Obama Administration denied ICA drafters access to this intelligence on grounds of Executive or Congressional privilege.”
While it is unclear what intel would be protected by congressional privilege, executive privilege rests in the president of the United States, meaning Barack Obama prevented the drafters of the ICA from reviewing relevant information.
What intel Obama directed Brennan and others to keep from those drafting the ICA is also unclear, but the recent release by Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, of internal emails related to the ICA suggest the material withheld under the guise of executive privilege, or elsewise, was extensive.
A little over a week ago, Director Gabbard
released a report revealing that soon after Obama ordered the rushed crafting of the ICA, a top official in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) eighty-sixed an already completed President’s Daily Brief that concluded Russia had not hacked the 2016 presidential election. As The Federalist
reported at the time, emails declassified by Director Gabbard indicate the ODNI “buried the PDB to provide the intelligence community cover to issue a contrary assessment concerning Russia’s efforts to interfere in the 2016 election — and did so, against the recommendations of a wide array of intelligence professionals.”
In addition to that explosive news, another
email thread in the hundred-plus pages of declassified emails revealed another shocking detail: The intelligence officer charged with conducting an “analytic scrub” of the “noncompartmented” version of the ICA had no knowledge that the ICA report referenced, much less relied upon, the Steele dossier.
Director Gabbard’s report referred to this analyst as an “ODNI Whistleblower,” noting that he was shocked when asked as part of a FOIA request in September of 2019 to search email systems for material related to the Steele dossier, being told “the dossier was a factor in the 2017 ICA on the election interference in which an assessment of the document was added as an annex.”
“I am choosing my words carefully, for your awareness, because the premise of the message is concerning,” the ODNI whistleblower wrote in response to learning the dossier was relied upon in completing the ICA. Then, after explaining his role in the development of the ICA, the whistleblower stressed, “
t included no dossier reference that I recall.” Further, “[a]t no point did [redacted name] suggest that there was any analytically significant reporting that I was NOT seeing, with the exception of compartmented material.” And here, the whistleblower noted that he had “asked repeatedly” whether there was any analytically significant reporting because of “concerns” he held regarding a key judgment of the analysis.
“At no point did I see or consider what I gather is, or was represented to be, ‘dossier’ materials,” the ODNI whistleblower’s email to another member of ODNI continued, adding that he “heard second hand from [redacted name], ostensibly recounting words of then DNI Clapper, on the day of a briefing to current [then, I think, just elect] POTUS, about inclusion of dossier materials in a presentation to POTUS elect. This was characterized as an unexpected and unwanted sudden and unilateral act by then DIR FBI Comey, and as a source of concern to the DNI.”
Of course, that was not true, as both Director Clapper and CIA Director Brennan colluded with Comey to include the dossier in an annex. But the DNI intelligence officer, turned ODNI whistleblower, who worked on the ICA knew nothing about the assessment’s reliance on the dossier. This led him to conclude that “IF the Dossier material WAS used by the NIC, unless it is also compartmented,” he was “deceived and excluded [] from things [he] was cleared for and had need to know, . . . .”
Here, the ODNI whistleblower is both right — and wrong. He properly concludes that he was deceived and excluded from things he was cleared for and had a need to know, but he inaccurately assumes that if the dossier was “compartmented” there was no concern.
“Compartmented” information is tightly held intelligence that is accessible only to specifically identified and approved individuals. The ODNI whistleblower noted in his emails that he had not “participate[d] in the crafting of the compartmented version” of the ICA, assuming that fact might explain away his ignorance about the ICA’s reliance on the Steele dossier.
But that does not explain why the Steele dossier was compartmented in the first place. Or rather, it does: to keep the honest analysts responsible for finalizing the classified and unclassified version of the ICA from discovering the shady and fake intel Brennan buried in the compartmented version.
In discussing the compartmentalizing of the intel for the ICA, the CIA’s report questioned “whether the extreme limitations on access to underlying intelligence within the IC during the ICA’s preparation was justified.” Here, the CIA stressed that the “ICA had been shared with more than 200 US officials.” “This is unusually high for such a highly compartmented product,” the CIA noted in questioning the compartmentalization of the materials.
While the compartmentalized version of the ICA has yet to be declassified, the HPSCI report released last week reveals large swaths of intel that were included only in the compartmentalized version and thus withheld from analysts working on the classified and unclassified versions. The HPSCI report stressed this point, explaining “the highly compartmented nature of the raw reporting made it difficult or impossible for most readers to see the foundational sources.”
The Steele dossier was but one of the documents included in the compartmentalized ICA but excluded from the public and classified versions of the report. This reality becomes clear when you compare what the HPSCI report states about the ICA with the previously classified version of the ICA that Director Gabbard recently released.
Details in recently declassified documents further implicate President Barack Obama in launching the Russia collusion hoax.
thefederalist.com