Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has been declassifying and releasing documents that she says suggest a “years-long coup” against President Donald Trump.
Among them is a September 2020 House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence report that revealed the intelligence community was preparing a Presidential Daily Brief for then-President Barack Obama in December 2016 that was going to downplay Russia’s interference in the 2016 election.
But that brief was never distributed. Instead, documents released by Gabbard show there was a complete change in the intel community’s attitude toward Russian meddling after a December 9, 2016, White House meeting between Obama, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, CIA Director John Brennan, National Security Advisor Susan Rice, Secretary of State John Kerry, Attorney General Loretta Lynch, Deputy Director of the FBI Andrew McCabe, and other high-level officials.
Then came the January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) that hyped the Russian collusion narrative and downplayed intel that suggested otherwise. The long-buried House report, however, analyzed the tradecraft used to compile the ICA and found that its production “was subject to unusual directives from the president and senior political appointees,” particularly then-CIA Director Brennan, and was “not properly coordinated with CIA or [the intelligence community].”
As journalist Matt Taibbi explained on The Megyn Kelly Show last week, the ‘Russia meddled to help Trump’ claims were fabricated based on the discredited Steele Dossier and other flimsy evidence. But now there is another element of the Russiagate hoax that is being called into question.
While it has been generally accepted that Russian-backed hackers infiltrated Democratic National Committee (DNC) email servers ahead of the 2016 election – the contents of which ended up being posted to WikiLeaks – newly declassified intelligence is casting doubt on whether that was actually the case.
On Tuesday’s show, Megyn was joined by independent journalist Aaron Maté to explain what we are now learning about the DNC emails and why the Russiagate hoax may run deeper than previously known.
Who Hacked What?
Maté called the purported email hacking a “core allegation at the heart of Russiagate” that predated the collusion claims. After WikiLeaks published the trove of internal communications in the summer of 2016, Maté said Hillary Clinton’s campaign, through its contractor CrowdStrike, was the first to blame the Russians.
He said the media ran with the accusation, and it was further endorsed with “high confidence” by the 2017 ICA that Russia hacked the DNC and gave the emails to Wikileaks. And that theory has remained relatively unchallenged – until now.
“We all know by now that ‘collusion’ was a complete scam laundered through the Clinton campaign through Christopher Steele… but they have clung to the Russian email hacking allegation,” Maté explained. “And what we get now from Tulsi Gabbard’s declassification is that, in September of 2016… the FBI and the NSA, which are the two premier intelligence agencies that would be able to investigate this hack and leak allegation… had low confidence in the Russia hacking/leak allegation.”
But Maté said the public was never made aware of that. “That was suppressed,” he noted. “Instead… the Obama administration put out a report through Clapper, who was then heading the Office of Director of National Intelligence, and Jeh Johnson, who was heading Department of Homeland Security, on October 7… [saying], in the name of the intelligence community, they have ‘high confidence’ that Russia was behind the hacking of the DNC, suppressing what the FBI and the NSA had said.”
As Maté explained, that suppression continued after the election and the FBI and NSA findings were further buried by the 2017 ICA. “Someone might argue… what if the U.S. got new intelligence after the FBI and NSA first made that low confidence assessment? Well, now we know from the declassified [House] report… that basically no new intelligence was collected after the election, that most of the intelligence that went into the ICA was collected before the election,” he noted. “[That] means at the time that the FBI and the NSA made their low confidence assessment that Russia hacked the DNC, no new evidence was collected after that to change their minds.”
ClowdStrike Claims
And let’s not forget about ClowdStrike’s claims. “At the same time as the Clinton campaign was framing Trump as a Russian asset, they were also hiring a firm, CrowdStrike, which first accused Russia of hacking the DNC,” Maté said. “And when the FBI went to CrowdStrike and said, ‘Can we investigate the DNC servers for ourselves?’ CrowdStrike said no, and for some reason the FBI agreed to that.”
As it turns out, then-CrowdStrike President Shawn Henry testified before Congress in December 2017 that his company actually had “no evidence” the alleged Russian hackers took anything from the DNC. “That’s a pretty big admission… that was buried for almost three years,” Maté noted. “So, that’s just another example of countervailing evidence that comes out years after the fact that undermines this explosive allegation.”
A Closer Look at the FBI
Megyn noted there is new reporting that might shed some light on why the FBI did not push harder. Fox News reported on Monday that “U.S. intelligence had credible foreign sources indicating that the FBI would play a role in spreading the salacious Trump-Russia collusion narrative — before the bureau ever launched its controversial Crossfire Hurricane probe.”
Maté said this dovetails with the fact that “we do know that [then-CIA Director] John Brennan briefed Obama right before the Trump-Russia investigation was opened on July 31, [2016,] that he had picked up intelligence that Russia was aware of a plot in which Hillary was going to frame Trump as a Russian aspect and tie that to alleged Russian interference.”
But Maté noted that those close to Brennan have said that did not cause alarm bells in the way one would expect. “And now we learn, actually, what Brennan was concerned about was not that Hillary was framing Trump as a Russian asset, but that Russia was aware of it – that is what allies of Brennan have said,” he said. “Brennan sent a referral to the FBI making sure that they were aware of this in early September.”
“If this Fox News report is correct that there is new evidence that the FBI was in on this, it just tracks exactly with what we already know,” he added.
You can check out Megyn’s full interview with Maté by tuning in to episode 1,118 on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you like to listen. And don’t forget that you can catch The Megyn Kelly Show live on SiriusXM’s Triumph (channel 111) weekdays from 12pm to 2pm ET.