Steven Ahle| Opinion| Devin Nunes and Matt Gaetz appeared on The Sean Hannity Show to discuss the released footnotes. Devin Nunes was not happy that this information was not revealed during House investigations.
That footnote could spell real trouble for John Brennan. We know already that John Durham is focusing on John Brennan as he investigates how the coup against President got started.
Durham has allegedly convened a grand jury and has already questioned several members of the intelligence community. And this footnote may explain it all.
Nunes said:
I hope that there better be people who are charged with lying and obstructing a Congressional investigation because we should have been given this information. One more important point. Remember the ICA that I called Obama’s dossier. Remember that they put that together in late 2016 after the election. What did it say? It said that oh the Russians were trying to help Trump. In that report, in the annex they put in, what? That Christopher Steele paid for dirt Steele dossier. Now if that is all the information we have from all of our intelligence assets where was the information that we now learned from the Horowitz report? Why was that not in the ICA?
The footnote explains that two Russian agents were feeding information to Christopher Steele. They had discovered that Steele was investigating Donald Trump and they took it from there.
The FBI had been warned about the DNC and Hillary bought and paid for scandal sheet was bogus but they used it anyway.
Author Lee Smith wrote about this in his book “The Plot Against the President.” An excerpt from the book was published at The Federalist.
Obama’s biggest move against Trump was to order CIA director John Brennan to conduct a full review of all intelligence relating to Russia and the 2016 elections. He requested it on December 6 and wanted it ready by the time he left office on January 20. But the sitting president already knew what the intelligence community assessment (ICA) was going to say, because Brennan had told him months before.
Brennan’s handpicked team of CIA, FBI, and NSA analysts had started analyzing Russian election interference in late July. In August, Brennan had briefed Harry Reid on the dossier and may have briefed Obama on it, too. Earlier in August, Brennan sent a “bombshell” report to Obama’s desk.
When Brennan reassembled his select team in December, it was to have them reproduce their August findings: Putin, according to Brennan, was boosting the GOP candidate. And that’s why only three days after Obama ordered the assessment in December, the Washington Post could already reveal what the intelligence community had found.
“The CIA,” reported the December 9 edition of the Post, “has concluded in a secret assessment that Russia intervened in the 2016 election to help Donald Trump win the presidency, rather than just to undermine confidence in the U.S. electoral system.”
The story was the first of many apparently sourced to leaks of classified information that were given to the Post team of Adam Entous, Ellen Nakashima, and Greg Miller. The reporters’ sources weren’t whistle-blowers shedding light on government corruption— rather, they were senior US officials abusing government resources to prosecute a campaign against the newly elected commander in chief. The article was the earliest public evidence that the coup was under way. The floodgates were open, as the IC pushed more stories through the press to delegitimize the president-elect.
A Wave of Leak-Sourced Stories All Saying the Same Thing
The same day, a New York Times article by David E. Sanger and Scott Shane echoed the Post’s piece. According to senior administration officials, “American intelligence agencies have concluded with ‘high confidence’ that Russia acted covertly in the latter stages of the presidential campaign to harm Hillary Clinton’s chances and promote Donald J. Trump.”
A December 14 NBC News story by William M. Arkin, Ken Dilanian, and Cynthia McFadden reported that “Russian President Vladimir Putin became personally involved in the covert Russian campaign to interfere in the U.S. presidential election, senior U.S. intelligence officials told NBC News.”
The ICA that Obama ordered gave political operatives, the press, and his intelligence chiefs a second shot at Trump.
