John Brennan (shown), CIA director for Barack Hussein Obama and a former Communist Party voter, suppressed intelligence that Russian President Vladimir Putin wanted Hillary Clinton to win the 2016 election.
The claim from Fred Fleitz, former chief of staff of the National Security Council under President Trump, appears in his analysis of a recently released report from the Senate Intelligence Committee that disputes a two-year-old report from the House Intelligence Committee.
Writing for Fox News yesterday, Fleitz reported that staff members of the House committee told him that Brennan kept the truth about Putin’s presidential preference out of an intelligence community assessment that instead concluded Putin favored Trump.
The Putin-Trump claim undoubtedly fortified the debunked left-wing conspiracy theory that the Trump campaign “colluded” with Russia to win the election.
Two Reports
The heart of Fleitz’s claim lies in the two committee reports.
The House report, published in 2018, concluded that the intelligence community assessment in question was “politicized to hurt Trump,” a conclusion with which Fleitz, a former CIA analyst and House Intelligence Committee staff member, agreed. Brennan and his underlings, the House concluded, did not follow proper procedures in preparing the assessment.
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On Tuesday, the Senate committee released a report that concluded the opposite. It says the analysts who prepared the assessment did their jobs correctly.
But “who is right?” Fleitz asked.
“Accusing the intelligence community of improper ‘analytic tradecraft’ in analyzing Russia’s strategic intentions is an extremely grave indictment for a congressional oversight committee to make,” Fleitz wrote. “The House committee found the intelligence community assessment violated protocols for drafting such assessments.”
Fleitz explained that assessments are “community products” that must be “vetted with all intelligence agencies.” But only three of the 14, the CIA, FBI, and NSA, were involved. Those three agencies used two dozen “handpicked” analysts, he wrote, and “other intelligence agencies working on this issue, such as the Defense Intelligence Agency and the Department of Homeland Security, were excluded.”
But even worse, Fleitz wrote, three of Brennan’s torpedoes drafted the report. The one-time communist partisan was the “most politicized intelligence chief in American history”:
Contrary to common practice for controversial intelligence community assessments, Brennan’s team allowed no dissenting views or even an annex with reviews by outside experts.
These were extraordinary violations of intelligence community rules to ensure that analysis is accurate and trusted. The Senate committee reports ignored these foundational violations.
The Senate Intelligence Committee report falsely claims that “all analytical lines are supported with all-source intelligence” and that analysts who wrote the intelligence community assessment consistently said they “were under no politically motivated pressure to reach specific conclusions.”
House Intelligence Committee staff members found the opposite. They told me there was conflicting intelligence evidence on Russian motivations for meddling in the 2016 election.
Bad as that is, the revelation about Brennan — that he deep-sixed the truth to hurt Trump — is even worse.
Putin Wanted Hillary
Whatever Russia’s motivations for meddling in the 2016 election, they didn’t favor Trump, Fleitz wrote. The House committee staffers told Fleitz that Putin preferred Clinton:
They said that CIA Director Brennan suppressed facts or analysis that showed why it was not in Russia’s interests to support Trump and why Putin stood to benefit from Hillary Clinton’s election. They also told me that Brennan suppressed that intelligence over the objections of CIA analysts….
Brennan suppressed high-quality intelligence suggesting that Putin actually wanted the more predictable and malleable Clinton to win the 2016 election.
Instead, the Brennan team included low-quality intelligence that failed to meet intelligence community standards to support the political claim that Russian officials wanted Trump to win, House Intelligence Committee staff revealed. They said that CIA analysts also objected to including that flawed, substandard information in the assessment.
Fleitz also noted that Brennan’s sub-rosa activities “supported the basic premise of the widely discredited Steele Dossier that, according to recently declassified FBI documents, contained Russian disinformation.”
Weak Senate Intel Chief
The Senate committee concluded the opposite of the House, Fleitz averred, because Democrats would never “allow any references in the panel’s reports that intelligence was slanted and weaponized to undermine Trump’s presidency.”
As well, committee chief Richard Burr of North Carolina, now in trouble over major stock trades after a secret briefing on the Chinese Virus as the pandemic began, is an “extraordinarily weak” chairman. Burr permits ranking minority member Mark Warner of Virginia to run the committee and “refused to cooperate with President Trump’s attempts to name a new director of national intelligence last summer because of Warner’s objections.”
Last, Fleitz believes that intelligence officers who told the truth to Republican House committee staffers “would not level” with Senate investigators because what the officers said would get back to their superiors and wreck their careers.
Photo: AP Images
R. Cort Kirkwood is a long-time contributor to The New American and a former newspaper editor.
