Miranda Devine: Bumbling Obama aides actually admit Russiagate was a smear campaign against Trump
It's hard to believe that the Russiagate plotters are so stupid, but the declassified documents tumbling out of Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard's files show that, while they had a lot of power and managed to hide their nefarious activities for almost a decade, President Barack Obama's henchmen were none too bright.
The latest tranche of declassified emails has Obama's DNI, James Clapper, telling then-Director of the National Security Agency Mike Rogers essentially to shut up and put his name to the intelligence community assessment (ICA) that Clapper and then-CIA Director John Brennan were cooking up, at Obama's direction, to concoct a narrative that Russia had tilted the 2016 election to help Trump win.
'Understand your concern,' Clapper wrote to Rogers on Dec. 22, 2016, in the waning days of the Obama administration.
'It is essential that we (CIA/NSA/FBI/ODNI) be on the same page and are all supportive of the report — in the highest tradition of 'that's OUR story, and we're sticking' to it.' '
Compromised
Rogers had kicked off the conversation by laying out his concerns that normal tradecraft was being compromised and that his team had not had 'sufficient access to the underlying intelligence and sufficient time to review that intelligence.'
'I'm concerned that, given the expedited nature of this activity, my folks aren't fully comfortable saying that they have had enough time to review all of the intelligence to be absolutely confident in their assessments,' Rogers wrote.
'I know that you agree that this is something we need to be 100% comfortable with before we present it to the President — we have one chance to get this right, and it is critical that we do so.
'In addition, if NSA is intended to be a co-author of this product, I personally expect to see even the most sensitive evidence related to the conclusion.'
But Clapper was unyielding.
'More time is not negotiable,' he replied, copying Brennan and then-FBI Director James Comey on the email.
'We may have to compromise on our 'normal' modalities, since we must do this on such a compressed schedule.'
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'This is one project that has to be a team sport.'
Team sport.
What an unprofessional, idiotic thing to say, let alone write down for posterity.
As Gabbard said when she released the emails Wednesday: 'Clapper's own words confirm that complying with the order to manufacture intelligence was a 'team sport.' '
There was no reason for the ICA to be completed under such a compressed schedule — less than a month from the Oval Office meeting on Dec. 9, 2016, when Obama ordered Clapper, Brennan, Comey and others to prepare a new intelligence assessment to replace all the inconvenient others before the election that had found that Russia wanted to sow discord but was not partial to one candidate over the other.
In fact, previous declassified material released by Gabbard shows that Russian spies possessed damaging material on Hillary Clinton's 'psycho-emotional' and physical ailments that they were withholding until after the election because they were so certain she would win.
But Obama wanted the cooked ICA to be released before Trump's transition on Jan. 20, 2017.
He wanted to do maximum damage to Trump, whose election was a repudiation of Obama's presidency, and of course to cover up Hillary's scandals — including her BleachBitted private server, missing emails and alleged pay-for-play at the Clinton Foundation.
Pre-inaugural smear
And thus, the ICA was released on Jan. 6, 2017, using the discredited and fictional Steele dossier to underpin its findings, with Brennan running roughshod over the objections of the CIA's top Russia experts by insisting it be included, not just in an appendix but in the main body.
The ICA 'findings' were leaked to the media before the intelligence analysts had even started work.
On the very day Obama ordered the ICA, Dec. 9, 2016, The Washington Post ran an anonymously sourced story that claimed 'the CIA has concluded in a secret assessment that Russia intervened in the 2016 election to help Donald Trump win the presidency.'
How prescient of them.
The framing of Trump as a Russian asset sabotaged his first presidency, in what Gabbard has called a 'years-long coup.'
It undermined his authority and allowed his detractors to paint him as an illegitimate president installed by his 'handler' Vladimir Putin.
There is no knowing exactly how the lies affected the relationship between the US and Russia, and how they factored into Russia's invasion of Ukraine, but they linger in the historic backdrop of Trump's meeting with Putin in Alaska Friday, to try to end that awful war.
Anti-lawfare lawyer Mike Davis, founder and president of the Article III Project, says Russiagate is 'the biggest scandal in American history — and there will be indictments . . .
'Obama, Biden, Hillary, Brennan, Clapper, and so many others, they made up the Russian collusion hoax to protect Hillary Clinton and to hurt then-presidential candidate Donald Trump. When they failed and Trump won, they used it to try to destroy President Trump's presidency. And when he declassified Crossfire Hurricane [the FBI counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign's nonexistent collusion with Russia], they tried to destroy him. They tried to bankrupt him, throw him in prison for life, take him off the ballot, and get him killed.'
Davis says recently declassified evidence that suggests that the classified material leaked to harm Trump could lead to espionage charges for the leakers that, unlike most other federal crimes, has a 10-year statute of limitations under the Espionage Act.
'Criminal conspiracy'
Other potential charges for the coup plotters could include being engaged in a criminal conspiracy and covering it up, which is essentially a continuation of the conspiracy, meaning there is no statute-of-limitations obstacle for prosecutors.
Coup plotters might also face charges of 'conspiracy against rights,' says Davis, which is 'when you politicize and weaponize intelligence agencies and law enforcement to go after your political enemies for non-crimes, like Obama and Biden and Hillary and so many others did to Trump. That is the classic definition of a conspiracy against rights.'
Obama, whom President Trump calls 'the ringleader' of Russiagate, may face legal jeopardy, says Davis, despite being protected by presidential immunity for official acts.
'You definitely do not have presidential immunity for your acts after you leave the White House as the former president of the United States, and when you continue to cover up your conspiracy, you are engaged in criminal conduct for which you do not enjoy presidential immunity.'
Davis advises anyone involved in Russiagate to 'lawyer up. Justice is definitely coming, and nobody's above the law.'
It is just amazing that such bumbling blockheads got away with it for so long.
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