Both have declassified material related to the creation of a 2017 intelligence community assessment, or ICA, that concluded, apparently without credible evidence, that Russia aspired to help Trump win the election. The FBI then spent years digging into whether Trump aided Russia in achieving that goal.

“Let’s recap. The Trump administration’s claims focus on the intelligence community’s findings about Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, which were published in January 2017.” 

This is not, in fact, what the Trump administration has focused on. Gabbard and Ratcliffe have not questioned the intelligence community’s findings that Russia meddled in the 2016 election. 

Instead, their focus has been on an additional conclusion that the Obama administration drew: that Russia’s intention was to help Trump win.

Memos released by the CIA and the DNI show this was not actually true and that Brennan, Clapper, and others had virtually no evidence to support the conclusion that Russian President Vladimir Putin preferred Trump. In fact, they had far more reliable evidence that suggested Putin expected former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to win and that Putin even had concerns about a Trump presidency.

“While some external critiques have noted that parts of the Russia investigation could have been handled better, multiple, thorough, yearslong reviews of the assessment have validated its findings and the rigor of its analysis.” 

Yearslong reviews of how the Crossfire Hurricane investigation came to be have not validated the Obama administration’s actions. In fact, almost all of them have found significant misconduct and substantial poor judgment, particularly at the FBI under then-Director James Comey.

Two reviews, one from the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and one from the CIA in a “lessons learned” review, found severe problems with the intelligence community assessment at the heart of the current controversy. Those reviews found that Brennan, in particular, set aside the typical safeguards that ensure analytical rigor in order to reach a conclusion — that Putin aspired to help Trump win — for which the CIA simply did not have credible evidence.

“The most noteworthy was the unanimous, bipartisan, five-volume report issued by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, whose Republican members at the time included Marco Rubio, now the secretary of state, and Senator Tom Cotton, now the committee chairman.”

This is not the most noteworthy review of Russiagate, but it’s one that Democrats and their allies in the media have used to defend themselves against what Gabbard and Ratcliffe are uncovering.

That’s because the Senate Intelligence Committee report did not really focus on questions about whether Trump was targeted by the intelligence community or by law enforcement. The five-volume report examined Russia’s activities during the 2016 election, including its hacking operations and its use of social media, and these activities are not in dispute.

One volume of the report did look at the drafting of the ICA in question; it did not find problems. However, the Senate Intelligence Committee investigators did not appear to have access to the same underlying evidence that Ratcliffe has exposed, including internal emails that directly contradict what Brennan has said publicly about the assessment, such as his denials that the Steele dossier was used in its creation.

When speaking to the Senate Intelligence Committee in 2018, Brennan denied he had wanted the Steele dossier to be used to support the conclusion that Russia wanted to help Trump win. His newly declassified emails reveal that he, in fact, pushed hard for the discredited dossier to be used.

“The special counsel John Durham, who was appointed during Mr. Trump’s first term to investigate how the Russia probe was conducted, similarly found no evidence of an Obama administration conspiracy against Mr. Trump. “

Durham found a significant amount of high-level political bias at virtually every step on the road to what became special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation. Not only did Durham find bias in the way Obama administration officials went after Trump aggressively based on almost no evidence, but he also found bias in the way those same officials shut down investigations into Clinton, even though they had far more reliable evidence against her than Trump.

Durham even found criminal wrongdoing, and he secured a guilty plea from an FBI lawyer who doctored an email to support a surveillance warrant against Carter Page, then a Trump campaign adviser, and to suppress evidence that made Page look far less suspicious than the FBI’s narrative.

While Durham’s investigation looked at actions taken by the Justice Department and the FBI, not the intelligence community, he nonetheless described how Brennan received intelligence in late July or early August that Clinton had planned to manufacture a scandal tying Trump to Russia. Brennan did not appear to factor that intelligence into the ICA when, just a few months later, he insisted on reaching the conclusion that Putin wanted to help Trump win.

“But [Durham] affirmed the findings of the special counsel Robert Mueller, who conducted a separate investigation into the allegations, which found ample evidence of Russian interference in the election.”

Mueller’s investigation was not about Russian interference in the election. Mueller was appointed to investigate alleged collusion between Trump and Russia.

While Democrats and the media have worked since 2019 to move the narrative goalposts when it comes to Russia, the reality is that Mueller’s investigation failed to establish any type of collusion whatsoever, despite that being its primary goal. Gabbard and Ratcliffe are exposing that there was nothing to collude on in the first place, as Russia was not even trying to help Trump win the election. 

GOP SHOWS LITTLE APPETITE FOR RELITIGATING JOHN BRENNAN’S RUSSIAGATE CLAIMS

And far from affirming Mueller’s investigation, Durham found ample evidence to suggest it should never have been opened in the first place.

“Every serious review has substantiated the intelligence community’s fundamental conclusion that the Russians conducted an influence campaign intended to help Mr. Trump win the 2016 election.”

The Durham report, the Justice Department inspector general report on FISA applications, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence report, and the CIA’s lessons-learned review have all found serious flaws in either the conclusion that Russia wanted to help Trump win or the investigative steps that were taken based on that conclusion.