At the direction of President Barack Obama in late 2016, our intelligence agencies pulled off what can only be described as a coup and a treasonous conspiracy against President-elect Donald Trump — a conspiracy that continued throughout his entire first term in office, hobbling his presidency and thwarting the will of the American electorate.
That’s what the bombshell documents released this week by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard reveal: a criminal scheme, at the highest levels of the federal government, to deprive Trump the fruits of his electoral victory and, by extension, the American people of meaningful self-government.
At the center of this scheme was President Obama and his intelligence chiefs, who in December 2016 launched a conspiracy to prevent Trump from taking office or, failing that, to hamstring his presidency. “The evidence that we have found and that we have released directly point to President Obama leading the manufacturing of this intelligence assessment. There are multiple pieces of evidence and intelligence that confirm that fact,” Gabbard said Wednesday, adding that her office has forwarded all documents to the Justice Department and FBI “to investigate the criminal implications of this.”
It’s possible that those responsible for this long-running coup will face some kind of criminal prosecution and possibly conviction, but it’s highly unlikely. No one should hold their breath waiting for an Obama mugshot, as well-deserved as that might be given what he and his top officials did.
However, that doesn’t mean that nothing at all can be done. The conspiracy that these documents reveal should lead to a thorough reform of our intelligence agencies — not for the sake of political retribution, but for the survival of our republic. Simply put, our intelligence agencies as currently constituted are incompatible with republican self-government and the rule of law. They now function here in America much as they have functioned abroad for decades: as coup machines, undermining national sovereignty and imposing their will over and against the will of the electorate.
If nothing else comes of this scandal, it should be this: the complete dismantling of the intelligence community and its total reconstitution into agencies that can be held accountable to democratically-elected leaders. Right now, it’s accountable to no one, as the recent revelations demonstrate.
What makes such reform difficult isn’t just the power and insularity of these agencies, but that in this particular case they were weaponized by an outgoing president, Obama, who gave his intel chiefs a directive to push out a narrative, backed by official intelligence assessments, that Moscow stole the election for Trump. If a corrupt president is able to use the intel agencies like this, then reform of the agencies is necessary to prevent it from ever happening again.
The ins and outs of how all this happened, and what exactly Obama and his intelligence chiefs did in November and December of 2016, is admittedly a bit confusing, especially for those who never followed or perhaps have forgotten what happened back then and why we should care now, more than eight years later.
My colleagues here at The Federalist have in recent days done the heavy lifting of laying it all out in clear and unmistakable terms: Mollie Hemingway explained how top intelligence officials were overruled by Obama’s CIA director, John Brennan, who insisted on the “key judgment” in a January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) that Russia had interfered in the election because Moscow “aspired to help President-elect Trump’s election chances.” The intelligence officials knew there was no evidence to substantiate that claim, which became a cornerstone of the Russia collusion narrative that Trump conspired with Russia to “steal” the 2016 election.
Shawn Fleetwood wrote about newly declassified records showing that “the phony dossier intel agencies used to spy on Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign was included in a critical Obama-era report on Russia’s activities in the 2016 election — despite claims from top Obama officials that it wasn’t.” That report, the above-mentioned ICA, relied on the infamous Steele dossier as evidence that Trump colluded with Moscow. Why? Because that was the only evidence they had to substantiate the explosive claim. The Steele dossier was of course an outlandish piece of opposition research paid for by the Clinton campaign, and everything in it was fabricated.
Keep in mind the key part of all this is that after Trump won the 2016 election, but before he took office, Obama, Brennan, DNI James Clapper, and FBI Director James Comey, along with other top intel officials, deliberately manipulated the ICA so they could claim that Moscow had helped Trump steal the election. Russia has for a long time meddled in our elections, seeking to sow chaos and undermine the democratic process. But in 2016, Obama and his intel chiefs decided to manufacture a narrative that this time Russia didn’t just want to sow chaos, it wanted to help Trump win and then intervened to make that happen. That’s the central claim of the Russia collusion hoax, and what we learned this week is that it was all based on totally bogus evidence — evidence that was cobbled together at the behest of Obama himself.
But the Obama team didn’t stop there. As my colleague Sean Davis has explained, “Obama intel officials then prepared separate versions of the ICA — one for Congress, which did not include references to Steele dossier in the main body, a declassified version for public release which also excluded the dossier even though it was unclassified, and one for Obama and other executive branch officials, which included the Steele dossier references in the main body. The newly declassified review of the ICA concluded that this sleight of hand was done to allow top intel officials to avoid any public scrutiny or accountability for their inclusion of false, Clinton-funded opposition research in an ICA.”
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