House Intelligence Committee staff said former CIA Director John Brennan “suppressed” intelligence indicating that Russia wanted Hillary Clinton to win the 2016 election, according to John Bolton’s former chief of staff.
The Senate Intelligence Committee released a report on Tuesday that defended the 2017 intelligence community assessment on Russian election interference and determined with “moderate” to “high” confidence that Russian President Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin sought to boost President Trump’s 2016 election chances.
One day later, Fred Fleitz, a former CIA officer and National Security Council chief of staff, wrote in a Fox News opinion piece that House Intelligence Committee members “found the opposite” motivations for Russia to interfere in the presidential contest.
“More gravely, they said that CIA Director Brennan suppressed facts or analysis that showed why it was not in Russia’s interests to support Trump and why Putin stood to benefit from Hillary Clinton’s election. They also told me that Brennan suppressed that intelligence over the objections of CIA analysts,” Fleitz wrote.
“House Intelligence Committee staff told me that after an exhaustive investigation reviewing intelligence and interviewing intelligence officers, they found that Brennan suppressed high-quality intelligence suggesting that Putin actually wanted the more predictable and malleable Clinton to win the 2016 election,” he added. “Instead, the Brennan team included low-quality intelligence that failed to meet intelligence community standards to support the political claim that Russian officials wanted Trump to win, House Intelligence Committee staff revealed. They said that CIA analysts also objected to including that flawed, substandard information in the assessment.”
The Senate intelligence panel’s 158-page bipartisan report, which was heavily redacted, said investigators found no evidence of political pressure to reach a specific conclusion and determined that the assessment by the CIA, FBI, and National Security Agency “presents a coherent and well-constructed intelligence basis for the case of unprecedented Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.”
Brennan, a vocal Trump critic, said that the Senate Intelligence Committee report “totally validated” the 2017 intelligence community assessment.
“I’m just very glad that the Senate Intelligence Committee yesterday came out with a report that totally validated the intelligence community’s assessment about Russian interference in the election in 2016 to help Donald Trump,” Brennan told Politico on Wednesday. “Donald Trump continues to call all these things hoaxes. They’re not. The only hoax is his representation of the facts. That’s the hoax. It’s because, I think, he has this quite understandable insecurity about what he’s done — well, this is what others have done.”
A House Intelligence Committee report released in 2018, a product that was not bipartisan, came to a different determination than the one in the Senate.
The GOP-led effort in the House concluded, “The majority of the Intelligence Community Assessment judgments on Russia’s election activities employed proper analytic tradecraft” but found that the “judgments on Putin’s strategic intentions did not.” The Democrats on the panel released their own assessment that said they found “no evidence” to cast doubt on the ICA’s assessment.
Rep. Devin Nunes, the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, sent several criminal referrals to the Justice Department last year related to the Trump-Russia investigation.
Putin, standing alongside Trump during a joint news conference in July 2018, said he wanted Trump to win the 2016 election “because he talked about bringing the U.S.-Russia relationship back to normal.”
Fleitz, who was a senior aide to former House Intelligence Committee Chairman Pete Hoekstra, argued the House Republicans got it right. He said, “Intelligence officers likely told different stories to Republican House Intelligence Committee and bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee investigators because of the strong political bias within intelligence agencies against President Trump.”
Fleitz called Republican Sen. Richard Burr an “extraordinarily weak” Senate Intelligence Committee chairman and said some on Capitol Hill joke that the CIA oversees him and not the other way around.
“Burr basically has allowed Committee Vice Chairman Mark Warner, D-Va., to run the committee. Burr refused to cooperate with President Trump’s attempts to name a new director of national intelligence last summer because of Warner’s objections,” he said.
Fleitz concluded his op-ed by touting U.S. Attorney John Durham’s review of the Russia investigation, which is reportedly looking into highly sensitive issues, including whether Brennan took politicized actions to pressure the rest of the intelligence community to match his conclusions about Putin’s motivations during the 2016 presidential election.
“One anticipates that a tough lawman like Durham, with confidence from both sides of the political aisle, will finally answer whether the 2017 intelligence community assessment was rigged to hurt Trump politically,” he wrote.
