It was worse than we thought.

The January 6, 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment concluding that Russian President Vladimir Putin “developed a clear preference” for Donald Trump and “aspired to help his chances of victory” is revealed in a report released this morning by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard to have been based on four pieces of evidence. One was the Steele Dossier. The surprise is that the other three were even less credible, each included over objections of the report’s CIA authors.

The first item was a “scant, unclear, and unverifiable fragment” of one sentence that the report’s five CIA authors read “five ways” and initially left out, only to have Director John Brennan order it back in. The second item was an email with “no date, no identified sender, no clear recipient, and no classification.” The third was supposedly backed by “liaison,” diplomatic, and press reporting, as well as signals intelligence (SIGINT), except the “SIGINT” didn’t mention Trump, the “liaison reporting” didn’t mention Trump and was from 2014, and the “diplomatic and media” reporting was a post-election review by a U.S. Ambassador citing a Russian pundit who said Putin and Trump should “work together like businessmen.” This was “evidence” that Putin “developed a clear preference” for Trump.

All three reports weren’t just unsourced and unreliable, but discarded fictions pulled out of the CIA’s trash heap. “They manipulated the manipulations,” is how ODNI Deputy Chief of Staff Alexa Henning put it.

The Assessment was written by just five CIA analysts hand-picked by Brennan, but even these most favored lieutenants couldn’t accept the key pieces of evidence. Two of the five went to Brennan to say, “We don’t have direct information that Putin wanted to get Trump elected,” only to be overruled. The same thing happened when members of the group objected to the Steele material, saying it didn’t meet even “basic tradecraft standards.” When confronted on this point, Brennan reportedly said, “Yes, but doesn’t it ring true?”

Similarly, when FBI agents tasked with preparing source material were asked about use of the Steele reports, one replied, “Our instructions were that anything we had was to be used,” and that “We were to push this.” The analyst added, about the Steele material, that FBI leadership had decided it was “the right thing to do,” but “we were not able to verify it.” Use of the dossier was debated but ultimately insisted upon by Brennan and FBI Director James Comey, who wrote, “I thought it very important that it be included.”

The information comes from a secret review conducted by a team of House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) investigators who worked “mostly at CIA Headquarters” and “spent over 2,300 hours reviewing the ICA and its source reports,” confirming what Racket and Public reported last year. A long list of other reporters, from Lee Smith to Aaron Maté to Paul Sperry to Ray McGovern to Margot Cleveland of The Federalist to Glenn Greenwald and the Internet sleuthing group “The Corner,” previously reported on the existence of this HPSCI report, which has been “locked in a vault” and “held hostage” at Langley since 2018, as current HPSCI chair Rick Crawford put it. Only after Donald Trump interceded in early July was this report returned to the Hill, and Gabbard’s ODNI has been working to declassify it ever since.

“The most egregious weaponization and politicization of intelligence in American history,” is how Gabbard described it today.

“Amazing,” is how former Judiciary Committee Chief Counsel Jason Foster describes the report. “It takes apart the ICA piece by piece.”

A staffer from the House intelligence Committee under Devin Nunes, who assigned the report in question, commented: “You don’t have to read much past the first page before it becomes crystal clear why the IC spent years trying to bury this report.”

Details about the poverty of the primary evidence linking Putin to Trump were not the only shock in the report. There were many, many more:

The omission of a major real piece of human intelligence speaking to Putin’s thinking exposes the Brennan/Comey/Obama Intelligence Assessment as a joke. “The ICA selectively omitted quotes from key HUMINT and SIGINT reports that contradicted the judgments on Putin’s intentions,” the report noted, “while conversely it included quotes — from those same HUMINT and SIGINT reports — that supported the ICA thesis.” The investigators added: “This was done multiple times.”

The most damning items in today’s release are the “three substandard CIA HUMINT reports,” meaning the three pieces of alleged human intelligence used in addition to the Steele dossier to support the idea that Putin “aspired” to help Trump after developing a “clear preference” for him. Each of these Three Deformed Bears of intelligence is more embarrassing upon closer inspection. In order:

THE “FRAGMENT”

The Intelligence Assessment was pieced together from fifteen CIA reports overall, of which only three involved the question of Putin preferring Trump. “Most of the 15 [reports] were unremarkable,” the investigators wrote, “but three contained flawed information, and these three became foundational sources… cited to claim Putin aspired to help Trump win.”

The sole source for the line that Putin “aspired to help” Trump came from a “scant, unclear, and unverifiable fragment of a sentence,” bolded below:

Putin had made this decision [to leak DNC emails] after he had come to believe that the Democratic nominee had better odds of winning the U.S. presidential election, and that [Trump], whose victory Putin was counting on, most likely would not be able to pull off a convincing victory.

In a detail not previously known, the ICA was written by just five CIA analysts. Regarding the above line, “whose victory Putin was counting on,” one senior CIA official said, “Five people read it five ways.” It was uncorroborated, with “uncertain meaning,” may have been a “garble,” and “would not have been published without [Brennan’s] orders.” Also, “it is not clear how it was obtained,” and at least one of the analysts who worked on the ICA thought the “victory” Putin was counting on involved Trump winning the nomination at the upcoming Republican convention.

The report added inferences that were not there. From “whose victory Putin was counting on,” which meant different things to everyone involved, Brennan and the ICA authors concluded that Putin “developed a preference for Trump” and ordered intelligence services to “assist Trump’s chances of victory when possible.”

The “fragment” was such junk that the ICA authors initially tried not to use it, but the DCIA — Director of the CIA John Brennan — corrected their manners:

Experienced CIA officers responsible for Russia reporting — evaluating raw intelligence and ensuring that HUMINT reporting meets the threshold for publication — initially omitted the confusing fragment from the first version of the report, which was published on 20 December 2016. DCIA countermanded their decision, however, and ordered that the fragment be included so that it could be cited in the ICA. A revised report was published on 28 December 2016.

It was “deviating from their own IC standards over and over, all in the service of one narrative,” says Foster.

The “Fragment” was likely not the worst of the three reports, however. That honor likely belongs to the next:

“IMPLAUSIBLE — IF NOT RIDICULOUS”

When the Intelligence Community Assessment was published in January of 2017, the first bullet point supporting the idea of a “clear preference” for Trump read:

As early as February 2016, a Russian political expert possessed a plan that recommended engagement with [Trump’s] team because of the prospects for improved US-Russian relations, according to reporting from service.

Even the intelligence professionals later tasked with reviewing the ICA could not let this slide without editorial comment. The passage, they wrote, “omits critical report context which, had it been made available to the reader, would show the report to be implausible — if not ridiculous — and missing so many key details as to be unusable.”

Why unusable? Because “‘the plan’ was just an email with no date, no identified sender, no clear recipient, and no classification. CIA could not vouch for the ultimate source’s vetting, validation, or access.”

John Brennan pulled from the trash a 10-month-old “anonymous email proposal” by an unknown person to place “a well-known pro-Kremlin official” on Trump’s “election team” in order to “formulate a mutually acceptable agenda between Trump and Putin.” It appears that this “idea” came not from Russia but perhaps another foreign service, perhaps Ukraine’s. Hilariously, the identity of the country of origin for this email was redacted from everyone’s eyes, including Barack Obama’s. Noted investigators:

There was no security justification for obscuring the identity of the service, as the ICA was written for the President, who is cleared for everything.

The “implausible — if not ridiculous” report was so cringeworthy, Brennan had to hide it even from the man who ordered it.

One last piece remained:

“NO EUPHORIA”

Another bullet supporting the notion that Putin had a “clear preference” for Trump was supposedly corroborated by “liaison, diplomatic, and press reporting, as well as sensitive signals intelligence (SIGINT).” But “in following-up every citation, none were found to corroborate the ICA claims.”

The “cited liaison reporting didn’t mention Trump at all, and was from 2014, before Trump was a candidate.” The diplomatic report was a “post-election overview of Moscow from the US Ambassador” that referenced a Russian pundit suggesting Trump and Putin should “work together like businessmen.” As the report noted, this was not exactly powerful evidence.

Moreover, that same Embassy cable quoted then-Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov as saying of Trump’s election, “We do not feel any euphoria,” citing a “bipartisan anti-Russian consensus,” which, the report noted, “contradicted the ICА judgment that the Russians preferred Trump.”

In sum, corroboration for the assertion that Putin developed a “clear preference” for Trump before the election included one item that was backdated and too early, one that was post-election and too late (and meaningless nonsense besides), and not one that was just right. If there’s such a thing as a no-hitter in intelligence, Brennan’s team was on the losing end of one in this ICA, which failed to produce one reliable fact supporting the idea of Putin “aspiring” to help Trump out of a “clear preference.”

One last note:

The report says Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) had an “arsenal” of “extraordinarily alarming” information on Hillary Clinton, potentially far more damaging than the information already leaked by Wikileaks. The SVR supposedly “possessed DNC communications that Clinton was suffering from ‘intensified psychoemotional problems, including uncontrolled fits of anger, aggression, and cheerfulness,’” and was “placed on a daily regimen of ‘heavy tranquilizers.’”

Worse, the report says the FSB had details of “secret meetings with multiple named US religious organizations, in which US State Department representatives offered — in exchange for supporting Secretary Clinton — ‘significant increases in financing’ from Department funds and ‘the patronage’ of State in dealing with ‘post-Soviet’ countries.”

Racket tried to seek comment from Clinton. There’s been no reply.

The report claims “Putin held back significant derogatory material that he had on Secretary Clinton,” material that in some cases Russia appeared to have acquired well before the reported “hack” of the Democratic National Committee.

It says “the SVR reported in January 2016 that it had information taken from a US think tank indicating that a high ranking official in the Democratic National Committee (DNC) knew about the application of political pressure on the FBI in the Clinton email investigation by a high ranking official of the US Department of Justice,” an apparent reference to correspondence from then-head of the DNC Debbie Wasserman Schultz about then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch.

The report released today notes Comey testified to the House Intelligence Committee in August 2016 that the SVR had emails in which Wasserman Schultz “was telling people that [former Attorney General Lynch] was working to control me, and keeping a named member of the Clinton campaign informed on what the FBI was doing in the [Clinton] email investigation.”

Though Comey and the FBI officially deemed the rumor not credible, Comey was concerned enough to tell Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz that the existence of these emails was a factor in his decision to announce the completion of the Clinton email investigation early, on July 5, 2016. If they affected Comey’s decisions, that’s a strong indication that the emails both exist and were in Russia’s possession, and might have been released by Putin if he wanted to do more damage to Clinton in that campaign. As today’s report notes, he did not do so, even after being advised by army intelligence (GRU) that Trump would not win absent an intervention of “remarkable” derogatory information, which they apparently had.

“Not only did he hold it back,” the report reads, “he did so when it mattered most, in the closing weeks of the campaign as the polls narrowed.”

A reason not to dismiss these claims entirely comes from the last major surprise in the report: the “arsenal” of negative information on Clinton came from the same trove of purloined material a source called “T1” had earlier provided to the FBI in the course of the Hillary Clinton email investigation. Ironically, it’s the same material written about in Racket yesterday, in conjunction with the seemingly unrelated declassification of part of an Inspector General report on the FBI’s Midyear Exam probe. In other words, while Gabbard’s release may be the closing word on the legitimacy of the ICA, she may have opened a new vein of questions at the intersection of Russiagate and the Clinton Email investigation. All that is in the future, however.

For now, this is a massive repudiation of the Trump-Russia narrative, and a near- perfect repeat of 2002-2003, when some of the same people helped package bunk evidence to bring America to war with Iraq. James Clapper later wrote a book called Facts and Fears in which he described being ordered by Dick Cheney to “find the WMD sites,” then boasted that the images he provided as head of the National Imagery and Mapping Agency “carried the day” when Colin Powell used them in his infamous speech to the UN in support of war. In hindsight, Clapper described who was to blame for the WMD fiasco that followed. The failure, he said, belongs:

Squarely on the shoulders of the administration members who were pushing a narrative of a rogue WMD program in Iraq and on the intelligence officers, including me, who were so eager to help that we found what wasn’t really there.

The material that was leaked to newspapers and television stations with such fanfare on December 9th, 2016 was the same trick of finding things that weren’t “really there,” with intelligence officials ordered to “push this” because “doesn’t it ring true?” It’s the same scam, except aimed at an incoming president instead of Saddam Hussein.

The litmus test now will involve waiting to see if any of the principals of the story, like Clapper or Brennan or Comey or even Obama, come up with alternative explanations for how they came to their key conclusion. “Don’t hold your breath,” one source advised.

The fight to get this material out is becoming an notable subtext. On July 14th, at the Turning Point convention, Gabbard told audiences, “The Deep State is fighting us every step of the way.” There have been internecine disputes throughout, over everything from today’s HPSCI report to the testimony of the former DNI whistleblower referenced in last weekend’s release by Gabbard. There are factions within Donald Trump’s own government who are opposed to this material’s release. Thankfully, for now, he’s ignoring them.

More to come.