As early as mid-December 2016, then-President Barack Obama publicly endorsed the CIA’s emerging view that Russian President Vladimir Putin favored Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton in the presidential election—despite the fact that the intelligence community assessment (ICA) was still being drafted and had not yet been finalized or agreed upon.
Newly declassified documents confirm that Obama played a central role at critical moments in the unfolding of the Russiagate investigation, Just the News reported.
After Trump’s victory in November 2016, Obama directed the production of a new intelligence community assessment (ICA) on Russian election interference. Even before that assessment was finalized, Obama repeatedly embraced the controversial and ultimately flawed conclusion pushed by CIA Director John Brennan: that Putin had ordered interference in the 2016 election to harm Clinton’s campaign and benefit Trump.
That assertion later became the foundation for a widely accepted, but wrong, narrative about Russian meddling that dogged Trump throughout his first term.
In a mid-December 2016 interview with NPR—roughly two weeks before the intelligence community assessment (ICA) was finalized—Obama publicly endorsed a leaked CIA assessment on Russian election interference.
Referring to anonymous media reports, Obama stated that no one should be “surprised by the CIA assessment that this was done purposely to improve Trump’s chances.” His comments effectively validated the CIA’s alleged position before the formal ICA had been completed or officially released, Just the News noted further.
In both a mid-December 2016 White House press conference and an appearance on “The Daily Show” around the same time, Obama strongly suggested he had already concluded that Russia interfered in the election to hurt Clinton and help Trump—despite the intelligence community assessment (ICA) still being incomplete.
Although Obama promoted this narrative weeks earlier, a recent CIA review ordered by Director John Ratcliffe confirmed that the most highly classified version of the ICA wasn’t finalized until December 30, 2016. A less classified version was dated January 5, 2017, with the public version released the following day.
“The post-election January 2017 ICA was put together by just the CIA, FBI, and NSA — led at the time by [Brennan], then-NSA director Admiral Mike Rogers, and since-fired FBI Director James Comey — with input from then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper,” Just the News reported.
During a White House briefing last month, current DNI Tulsi Gabbard said: “There is irrefutable evidence that details how President Obama and his national security team directed the creation of an intelligence community assessment that they knew was false.
She added: “They knew it would promote this contrived narrative that Russia interfered in the 2016 election to help President Trump win, selling it to the American people as though it were true. It wasn’t.”
Leaks allegedly originating from the CIA began surfacing after Obama, in early December 2016, directed that an ICA on Russian interference be drafted and finalized before his departure from office the following month.
The New York Times had reported on Halloween 2016 that “law enforcement officials say that none of the investigations so far have found any conclusive or direct link between Mr. Trump and the Russian government” and that “even the hacking into Democratic emails, FBI and intelligence officials now believe, was aimed at disrupting the presidential election rather than electing Mr. Trump.”
But soon afterward, the leaks would shift the narrative to implicate some nefarious ties between Trump and Russia that were never true.
Earlier this week, Gabbard stated that Russia sought to sow chaos during the 2016 election and had anticipated a Clinton victory.
Gabbard shared her assessment during a conversation with the New York Post’s Miranda Devine on the latter’s “Pod Force One” podcast, which was released Wednesday.
“As we’ve learned in later documents that we’ve reviewed throughout that campaign, Russia believed that Hillary Clinton would win the election,” Gabbard said. “They felt it was inevitable.”