Although Robert Mueller failed to find an election conspiracy between Donald Trump and Moscow, the former Special Counsel threw a lifeline to the Russiagate narrative by alleging that the Kremlin had engaged in a “sweeping and systematic” effort to get Trump elected and “sow discord” among Americans.
Six years later, that questionable but enduring claim continues to unravel.
According to newly declassified documents, U.S. intelligence leaders concealed high-level doubts about one of Russiagate’s foundational allegations: that Russia stole and leaked Democratic Party material to help Trump defeat Hillary Clinton. In a September 2016 report that was never made public until now, the NSA and the FBI broke with their intelligence counterparts and expressed “low confidence” in the attribution to Russia.
The previously undisclosed dissent about Russia’s alleged hacking activities in the 2016 election is among several revelations released last week by Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s Director of National Intelligence. According to Gabbard, President Obama and senior members of his cabinet “manufactured and politicized intelligence” in its waning months to wage “a years-long coup against President Trump.”
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.
“Low Confidence” in Core Allegation
Until now, the purported U.S. intelligence consensus on Russian meddling has been conveyed to the public in three seminal reports.
The first was a January 2017 intelligence community assessment (ICA) released in the final days of the Obama administration under the direction of Brennan and then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. The ICA accused Russian President Vladimir Putin of ordering an “influence campaign” to “denigrate” Democratic candidate Clinton and “help” Trump win the 2016 election. Some of this effort involved propaganda on Russian media outlets and messaging on social media.
The larger component hinged on the allegation that the GRU, Russia’s main intelligence agency, stole emails and documents from the Democratic Party and released that material principally via two online entities, DCLeaks and Guccifer 2.0, as well as the whistleblower organization WikiLeaks. Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, has long denied that Russia or any other state actor was his source. Nevertheless, the January 2017 ICA stated that U.S. intelligence had “high confidence” that Russia engineered the hack.
Hellbound and Down 