“Exclusive!” boasts Washington Post intel reporter Warren P. Strobel in a report this week: The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and “other intelligence agencies” didn’t want Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard to declassify a report that makes the CIA look bad.
In other news, the sky is blue, and the grass is green. Obviously, no one wants to be publicly embarrassed by the exposure of their substandard work — in this case work that led to the Russia collusion hoax, one of the political witch hunts that interfered with President Donald Trump’s first term.
As noted by Federalist Editor-in-Chief Mollie Hemingway on X, “Strobel frames everything as if he’s doing highly paid PR for bad actors in the spy agencies and their Democrat co-conspirators. Namely, HE DOES NOT EVEN TELL HIS READERS WHAT THE REPORT REVEALS about how shoddy Brennan/CIA’s work was!”
Strobel does not make it easy for the reader to see the report, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence’s 2020 staff report regarding the Intelligence Community Assessment on Russian Election Interference. At no point does he offer a link to the report or explain its explosive findings: that John Brennan, CIA director under former President Barack Obama, produced a sloppy Intelligence Community Assessment promoting the lie that Russian President Vladimir Putin interfered with the 2020 election to help Trump win. The foundation of Brennan’s report was an out of context fragment of a sentence that could not be confirmed and the comically false Steele dossier. A newly released CIA review shows high level CIA analysts and officers urged Brennan not to include the Steele dossier in the report.
Beyond being thin on facts, Strobel’s piece paints Gabbard as the villain right off the bat with the title, “Gabbard overrode CIA officials’ concerns in push to release classified Russia report.” It reads as if Gabbard did something wrong; she didn’t. Gabbard does not need permission to declassify these documents. Strange that a reporter, by trade, would champion keeping documents classified or highly redacted, as suggested in his piece. Normally reporters press for the most transparency possible.
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