WaPo Hides Russiagate Facts From Readers While Peddling PR

“Exclusive!” boasts Washington Post intel reporter Warren P. Strobel in a report this week: The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and “other intelligence agencies” didn’t want Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard to declassify a report that makes the CIA look bad.

In other news, the sky is blue, and the grass is green. Obviously, no one wants to be publicly embarrassed by the exposure of their substandard work — in this case work that led to the Russia collusion hoax, one of the political witch hunts that interfered with President Donald Trump’s first term.

As noted by Federalist Editor-in-Chief Mollie Hemingway on X, “Strobel frames everything as if he’s doing highly paid PR for bad actors in the spy agencies and their Democrat co-conspirators. Namely, HE DOES NOT EVEN TELL HIS READERS WHAT THE REPORT REVEALS about how shoddy Brennan/CIA’s work was!”

Strobel does not make it easy for the reader to see the report, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence’s 2020 staff report regarding the Intelligence Community Assessment on Russian Election Interference. At no point does he offer a link to the report or explain its explosive findings: that John Brennan, CIA director under former President Barack Obama, produced a sloppy Intelligence Community Assessment promoting the lie that Russian President Vladimir Putin interfered with the 2020 election to help Trump win. The foundation of Brennan’s report was an out of context fragment of a sentence that could not be confirmed and the comically false Steele dossier. A newly released CIA review shows high level CIA analysts and officers urged Brennan not to include the Steele dossier in the report.

Beyond being thin on facts, Strobel’s piece paints Gabbard as the villain right off the bat with the title, “Gabbard overrode CIA officials’ concerns in push to release classified Russia report.” It reads as if Gabbard did something wrong; she didn’t. Gabbard does not need permission to declassify these documents. Strange that a reporter, by trade, would champion keeping documents classified or highly redacted, as suggested in his piece. Normally reporters press for the most transparency possible.  

Strobel also cites as sources: “multiple people familiar with the matter” and later, “current and former U.S. officials,” which could be anyone from George W. Bush to the trash hauler at Arches National Park. How credible is a former official who is no longer in the loop? He also cites “people … speaking on the condition of anonymity, like others interviewed for this report, because of the matter’s sensitivity.”

There is a time for sensitivity, like when a dog dies. But embarrassing documents that could get people in trouble? No. This is a moment to use the journalist backbone and insist sources go public.

We could say Strobel hates kittens, sources familiar with the situation say, but that does not make it true.

It’s important to understand how embarrassing it is for the Washington Post to have to confront the documents Gabbard has released. Gabbard is not just making things up. These are real reports with real information that throws a wet blanket on the bogus Pulitzer Prize The Washington Post (and the New York Times) received for pushing anti-Trump Russian propaganda. They should give back the prize, and the cash that goes with it, now that their reporting is shown to be false.

Instead, the Washington Post continues to smear people like Gabbard who can threaten any remaining shred of the Washington Post’s credibility just by producing truth-telling documents. Meanwhile, lazy reporters lean on the Washington Post’s reputation as a Pulitzer Prize winner, repackage its stories, and repeat this propaganda.

Beth Brelje is an elections correspondent for The Federalist. She is an award-winning investigative journalist with decades of media experience.