President Trump’s spy chief is reportedly declassifying information that shows CIA Director John Brennan “suppressed” intelligence on Russia wanting Hillary Clinton to win the 2016 election.
Fox News chief White House correspondent Ed Henry said Tuesday evening that “it could get sticky” for Brennan, who served as CIA director under President Barack Obama, due to his role in developing the 2017 intelligence community assessment on Russian election interference that determined with “moderate” to “high” confidence that Russian President Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin sought to boost Trump’s 2016 election chances.
“There’s other intel that may have been more serious suggesting that Russia wanted Hillary Clinton to win, rather than balancing that out in the assessment they put out there in that assessment, and set the narrative that Russia wanted Trump to win,” Henry reported on Tucker Carlson Tonight.
Noting that Fred Fleitz, a former CIA officer and National Security Council chief of staff, first blew the whistle on Brennan’s alleged efforts to hide this information, Henry said he has a separate intelligence source who confirmed this intelligence is among the four or five batches of documents that Richard Grenell, the acting director of national intelligence, is working to declassify.
This follows Grenell declassifying a list of Obama administration officials involved in the “unmasking” of retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn in intelligence community intercepts of conversations the incoming Trump national security adviser had with a Russian envoy during the presidential transition period.
Flynn pleaded guilty in 2017 to lying to the FBI about his conversations with Russia’s then-ambassador to the United States, but he later declared his innocence and argued he was set up by the FBI.
The Justice Department filed to drop its criminal case against Flynn on Thursday, saying in a court filing that after reviewing newly disclosed materials, the agency agreed with Flynn’s attorneys that his interview with the FBI that took place in late January 2017 should never have taken place because his conversations with the Russian diplomat were “entirely appropriate.”
Instead of agreeing to dismiss the case immediately, the D.C. federal judge presiding over it, Emmet Sullivan, opened the matter to outside opinions on Tuesday, which earned a stern rebuke from Sidney Powell, a former federal prosecutor who took over representation for Flynn last summer.
Last week, in a private conversation with former administration officials that was leaked to Yahoo News, Obama said the Justice Department’s recent actions show the “rule of law is at risk.” His criticism came after the release of documents, which have raised questions about the extent to which Obama and Joe Biden, his vice president and now presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, were privy to the actions taken by the FBI in the case against Flynn in the waning days of the previous administration.
Henry said a DOJ representative confirmed to him that U.S. Attorney John Durham is looking into the Flynn “unmasking” issue “among others.” Durham, the top federal prosecutor in Connecticut, is conducting a criminal investigation of the Russia inquiry, which ultimately did not establish any criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin
Grenell delivered his unmasking list to the Justice Department last week.
The Washington Examiner reported on Monday that making the information public will be up to Attorney General William Barr and that the declassified list also likely includes the names of officials involved in other unmaskings near the end of Obama’s second term.
Henry reported the Justice Department told him it is not going to release the information being declassified, instead waiting for Grenell to do it himself.
Republicans have alleged since 2017 that Obama-era officials improperly unmasked associates of then-candidate Trump’s presidential campaign during the Russia investigation. Democrats have defended the intelligence-gathering process, arguing that the collection of identifying information is inevitable, and have raised concerns about Barr and Grenell taking actions that are influenced by politics.
Earlier this week, a letter was released that was signed by 2,000 former DOJ and FBI officials opposing the Trump administration’s decision to drop the case against Flynn.
Capping his report, Henry said there is criticism about his reporting.
“There are a lot of critics out there saying, ‘This is hype; there’s nothing here,'” he told host Tucker Carlson. But he also stressed that “people on the inside” say, “Wait” because “there’s a whole lot more coming.”
In a Fox News op-ed last month, Fleitz, who was John Bolton’s former chief of staff, said House Intelligence Committee members told him that 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.”
“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 upon release last month, 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. “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.
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.”
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.”
