Megyn Kelly Spars with George Clooney About Journalism
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As you’ve probably already heard, DNI Tulsi Gabbard has released some new information which, she claims, proves “the most egregious weaponization and politicization of intelligence in American history.”





I have declassified a @HouseIntel oversight majority staff report that exposes how the Obama Administration manufactured the January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment that they knew was false, promoting the LIE that Vladimir Putin and the Russian government helped President Trump win the 2016 election. 

In doing so, they conspired to subvert the will of the American people, working with their partners in the media to promote the lie, in order to undermine the legitimacy of President Trump, essentially enacting a years-long coup against him.

She then proceeds to argue that this undermines a lot of lies that were intentionally circulated at the time.





All of it goes back to a moment in time, December 2016, which is a long time ago at this point. Trump had, to almost everyone’s surprise, won the 2016 election but Obama and his people were still in office. The Steele dossier had already been put together by Hillary’s campaign and the DNC and floated out to every major news outlet as well as the FBI. But no one (outside of two articles about it published prior to the eleciion) had run with it because it couldn’t be confirmed. 

Things were at a tipping point. And in a matter of days events were set in motion which essentially reversed the conclusions the IC had reached up to that point, paving the way for an eventual briefing about the Steele dossier which was then also leaked to the media and finally resulted in the publication of the entire dossier.

Yesterday, Matt Taibbi, who has been following the new releases closely, went on Megyn Kelly’s show and together they walked through all of the new information. Taibbi is convinced there is a kind of smoking gun here, evidence that the intelligence community chose to embrace conclusions about Russia’s involvement in the election that their own staffers said could not be supported by the evidence. This story has a lot of moving parts so I found this primer is pretty helpful in bringing me back to that moment in 2016.





Very briefly, the IC was set to release a daily briefing to the president which concluded Russia had not interfered in the election beyond some general meddling aimed at undermining democracy in general. However, before that was released, Comey’s FBI backed out and said they would release their own assessment. That led Clapper to put a hold on the briefing.

Then on December 9, 2016, all of the top IC people had a meeting and after that meeting the assessment had changed to the conclusion that Russia had interfered in the election with the goal of helping Trump. This dovetailed perfectly with the allegations in the Steele dossier which the media had already seen but not published.

Meanwhile, there were people in these agencies who put it on the record that the big conclusion about Russia wanting Trump to win could not be justified by the intelligence available. Mollie Hemingway at the Federalist had a story about this yesterday.

The dispute was over the “key judgment” in a January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) that Russia had interfered in the election specifically because Putin and the Russian government “aspired to help President-elect Trump’s election chances.”

The senior intelligence officials pointed out the lack of evidence to substantiate the claim. “We have no intelligence to directly support this ‘aspiration’ point,” said one member of the small group of individuals working with Brennan, FBI Director James Comey, and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper on the assessment of Russian activity in the lead-up to the 2016 election.

The official worried that the inclusion of the claim would “open the IC to a line of very politicized inquiry that is sure to come up when this paper is shared with the Hill.”…

Brennan called the dissenting individuals into his office on Dec. 30, 2016, and had a lengthy meeting in which they articulated their serious concerns. “The assessment will stay the same,” Brennan reported at the end of the meeting.





The real tell that this was being driven by a desired outcome, according to Taibbi, is the fact that 24 hours after the new direction was set out by Brennan at the Dec. 9 meeting, before any of the work to produce new conclusions had taken place, the entire thing was leaked to the media. The NY Times had a story out literally the next day essentially echoing the direction Brennan wanted.

Here’s the full show. I’ve only made it through the first 35 minutes but it’s definitely helpful in clarifying what was happening. Kelly also notes there is disagreement about these conclusions on the right, with Andrew McCarthy suggesting this is a misread of the data. So take that for what it’s worth, but Kelly herself says she thinks Taibbi has the better argument.





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