What the heck does this mean? Can intelligence neither form an opinion before the election nor after the election? Only judgments made on Election Night are valid?
Ha ha ha - I thought that as well! It's poor writing.
However,
Miller has come out fighting! She's an ex-CIA agent that has street cred. She's also a Republican voter! Gabbard has zero street cred. These agents are lawyering up because Gabbard sounds poised to accuse them of treason. But of course, she's forced by Trump's obsessive need for revenge.
NPD much? It's just revolting to hear Gabbard attack real agents who took real risks doing real trade-craft in the field. What a
nasty piece of work she is - running like clockwork to the
NPD's every whim!
It's the Salem Witch Hunt - all over again!
And the thing is, because of the
NPD's own knowledge that he does not measure up and is an awful piece of work himself - HE accuses the world of a witch hunt anytime his OWN behaviour actually causes real consequences....
Susan Miller, the agency’s head of counter-intelligence at the time of the election, told the Guardian that Gabbard’s allegations were based on false statements and basic misrepresentations of discoveries made by Miller’s team about Russian actions, which she insisted were based on multiple trusted and verified sources....
....
Until Wednesday, none of the other high-level officials named in Gabbard’s recent report – including James Clapper, her predecessor as national intelligence director; John Brennan, the former CIA director; or the ex-FBI director James Comey – had responded publicly to her allegations. Clapper and Brennan broke their silence for the first time on Wednesday with a jointly written
op-ed article in the New York Times in which they called Gabbard’s allegations “patently false” and accused her of “rewrit[ing] history”.
In an interview, Miller – who is not named in the national intelligence director’s public narrative – questioned Gabbard’s grasp of intelligence matters.
Gabbard, who has never worked on the House intelligence committee while she was a member of Congress, has criticized the “tradecraft” of agents who compiled the assessment of Russia’s election activities.
“Has she ever met a Russian agent?” asked Miller, a 39-year agency veteran who served tours as CIA chief of station abroad. “Has she ever given diamonds to a Russian who’s giving us, you know? Has she ever walked on the streets of Moscow to do a dead drop? Has she ever handled an agent?
“No. She’s never done any of that. She clearly doesn’t understand this.”
Miller told the Guardian she was speaking out because Gabbard’s claims besmirched her work and and that of her team of up to eight members who worked on the Russia case.
“My reputation and my team’s reputation is on the line,” she said. “Tulsi comes out and doesn’t use my name, doesn’t use the names of the people in my team, but basically says this was all wrong and made up, et cetera.”
Miller and her former team members have recently hired lawyers to defend themselves against charges that could put them in jail.
Miller has hired Mark Zaid, a prominent Washington defense attorney, to represent her.
The scenario reprises a situation she faced in 2017, when – still a serving officer – Miller hired a $1,500-an-hour lawyer to represent her after being told she might face criminal charges for her part in authoring the same intelligence report now being scrutinized by Gabbard.
Investigators interviewed her for up to eight hours as part of a trawl to ferret out possible law-breaking under Obama that eventually that culminated in Bill Barr, the attorney general in Trump’s first administration,
appointing a special counsel, John Durham, to conduct an inquiry into the FBI’s investigation of links between the Trump campaign and Russia.
“They were asking things like: ‘Who told you to write this and who told you to come to these conclusions?’” Miller recalled.
“I told them: ‘Nobody did. If anybody had told us to come to certain conclusions, all of us would have quit. There’s no way, all none of us ever had a reputation for falsifying anything, before anything or after.’”
No charges were brought against her, but nor was she told the case was closed.
Durham’s 2023 report concluded that the FBI should never have launched its full investigation, called “Crossfire Hurricane” into the alleged Trump-Russia links.
But his four-year investigation was something of a disappointment to Trump and his supporters, bringing just three criminal prosecutions, resulting in a single conviction – of an FBI lawyer who admitted to altering an email to support a surveillance application.
It is this ground that is now being re-covered by Gabbard in what may be a Trump-inspired bid for “retribution” against political enemies who he has accused of subjecting him to a political witch-hunt.
But the crusade, Miller says, is underpinned by false premise – that the Russia interference findings were a “hoax”, a description long embraced by Trump and repeated by Gabbard in her
18 July report.
“It is not a hoax,” she said. “This was based on real intelligence. It’s reporting we were getting from verified agents and from other verified streams of intelligence.
“It was so clear [the Russians] were doing that, that it was never in issue back in 2016. It’s only an issue now because Tulsi wants it to be.”
Briefing journalists at the White House last week, Gabbard
cited a 2020 House of Representatives intelligence committee report – supported only by its Republican members – asserting that Putin’s goal in the election was to “undermine faith in the US democratic process, not showing any preference of a certain candidate”.
Miller dismissed that. “The information led us to the correct conclusion that [the interference] was in Trump’s favor – the Republican party and Trump’s favor,” she said. Indeed, Putin himself – standing alongside Trump at a news conference during a summit meeting in Helsinki in 2018 – confirmed to journalists that he had
wanted his US counterpart to win.
Rebuffing suggestions that she or her team may be guilty of pro-Democrat bias, she said she was a registered Republican voter. Her team consisted of Republicans, Democrats and “centrists”, she said.
Gabbard has claimed that agents were pressured – at Obama’s instigation – into fabricating intelligence in the weeks after Trump’s victory, allegedly to raise questions about its electoral legitimacy and weaken his presidency.
“BS... That’s not true,” said Miller. “This had to do with our sources and what they were finding. It had nothing to do with Obama telling us to do this. We found it, and we’re like, what do we do with this?”
At the core of Gabbard’s critique are two assertions that Miller says conflates separate issues.
One is based on media reports of briefings from Obama administration officials a month after Trump’s victory, including one claiming that Russia used “cyber products” to influence “the outcome of the election”. Gabbard writes that this is contradicted by Obama’s admission that there was no “evidence of [voting] machines being tampered with” to alter the vote tally, meaning that the eventual assessment finding of Russian interference must be false.
Miller dismisses that as a red herring, since the CIA’s assessment – ultimately endorsed by other intelligence agencies – was never based on assumptions of election machine hacking....
...Miller also denied Gabbard’s claim that the intelligence community’s “high level of confidence” in Russian interference had been bolstered by “‘further information” that turned out to be an unverified dossier written by Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence officer, which suggested possible collusion between Russia and Trump.
So there it is! Miller is also saying NO - they never concluded voting machines were hacked, and NO - they never based their intelligence on the Steele report.
But that doesn't stop Gabbard reasserting these tired old lies. It doesn't stop MAGA supporters in here repeating the same lies.
Are we supposed to feel sorry for her situation? If she doesn't like working for someone with
NPD - she should do the honourable thing and confront him publicly and get fired by him! She might get to write a book about it.
