The U.S. intelligence community is disputing information the media were given about a classified House Intelligence Committee briefing earlier this month, with officials denying that lawmakers were told that Russia is attempting to help President Trump in 2020.
“We cannot comment on classified briefings, but what we can tell you is that Shelby did not say Russia is aiding the reelection of President Trump,” a spokesperson for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence told the Washington Examiner.
The controversial classified briefing took place Feb. 13 and was conducted in part by Shelby Pierson, the intelligence community election threats executive under then-acting DNI Joseph Maguire. Officials from the FBI, CIA, and National Security Agency were also present. Sources cited by the New York Times last Thursday claimed Pierson warned that “Russia was interfering in the 2020 campaign to try to get President Trump reelected.”
John Brennan, CIA director under President Barack Obama, immediately spread the narrative to his 766,000 followers, claiming “we are now in a full-blown national security crisis” and “Trump is abetting a Russian covert operation to keep him in office for Moscow’s interests.”
A senior intelligence official told CBS News on Monday that “this was an interagency briefing with precoordinated messages that had been briefed to other congressional committees.”
NBC News cited officials who said “the misinformation and controversy” made them “worried that the public is not getting a full appreciation of the threat of foreign election interference in 2020.” The reports were “an overstatement, fueled, they believe, by a misinterpretation by some Democratic lawmakers on the committee.”
That echoes denials by a national security official cited by CNN’s Jake Tapper last Friday.
“What’s been articulated in the news is that the intelligence community has concluded that the Russians are trying to help Trump again. But the intelligence doesn’t say that,” Tapper’s source said. “The problem is, Shelby said they developed a preference for Trump. A more reasonable interpretation of the intelligence is not that they have a preference; it’s a step short of that.”
The official added, “It’s more that they understand the president is someone they can work with; he’s a deal maker. But not that they prefer him over” his Democratic opponents. “So it may have been mischaracterized by Shelby,” he said.
CNN reported an intelligence official said Pierson’s characterization was “misleading,” while a national security official said she didn’t provide proper “nuance.”
The Washington Post cited a source who claimed the briefing “was the catalyst” that led Trump to replace Maguire with U.S. Ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell as acting director of national intelligence. But national security adviser Robert O’Brien said Trump didn’t make the personnel switch because of the briefing.
Still, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff embraced the hotly disputed framing of the reports. When the New York Times published it, Schiff tweeted: “We count on the intelligence community to inform Congress of any threat of foreign interference in our elections. If reports are true and the President is interfering with that, he is again jeopardizing our efforts to stop foreign meddling.”
Trump called it “another misinformation campaign.”
“Nobody briefed me about that at all,” Trump said. “They leaked it, Adam Schiff and his group.”
Schiff called this a “nice deflection.”
“Your false claims fool no one,” he tweeted. “You’ve betrayed America. Again.”
“I haven’t seen any intelligence that Russia is doing anything to attempt to get President Trump reelected,” O’Brien said Sunday.
“He’s at it again by putting out, through his committee, information that is false,” Republican Rep. John Ratcliffe said this weekend. “I don’t know anyone in the last three years who has done more to help Vladimir Putin and Russia with their efforts to sow the seeds of discord in American elections and American election security than Adam Schiff has.”
“You have folks that have access to classified information that are not treating it with the respect that it deserves,” Ratcliffe told an audience at the Conservative Political Action Conference on Thursday. “Why is it always the case when it’s information that’s allegedly damaging to Donald Trump? It’s a one-way street.”
Daniel Hoffman, the CIA’s former Moscow station chief, told the Washington Examiner that Putin “wants our candidates to be on the defensive and to have one side accuse the other of being subjected to Russian influence.”
