The Central Intelligence Agency manipulated intelligence information to make it look like Russia wanted Donald Trump to win the 2016 presidential election despite having more credible information showing that Russia wanted Hillary Clinton to win, according to a new report.
The effort to manipulate the information was headed up by John Brennan, Obama’s CIA director, who disregarded evidence that the Russians preferred Clinton because she was more predictable and highlighted questionable evidence claiming Russia favored Trump, sources told independent journalists Matt Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger, and Alex Gutentag.
“They cooked the intelligence,” a source close to a House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) investigation into the Trump-Russia scandal told the journalists. “They made it look like Putin supported Trump.”
The U.S. government said in January 2017 that Russia favored Trump as president. But now, sources reveal for the first time that the CIA "cooked the intelligence" to hide that Vladamir Putin wanted Hillary Clinton, not Donald Trump, as president. pic.twitter.com/WFJsW1erqb
— Michael Shellenberger (@shellenberger) February 15, 2024
The source said that the evidence pointed the other way, showing Russia wanted Clinton to win because “it was a relationship they were comfortable with.” According to the source, the CIA had evidence showing Russia viewed Trump as “unreliable,” “mercurial,” and “not steady,” while viewing Clinton as “manageable and reflecting continuity.”
HPSCI looked further into the sourcing of the claims from Brennan and the Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) that Russia wanted Trump and found contradictory information.
“We looked at the report and the sourcing they used to evaluate the sourcing,” a source said. “When we dug further to look at the data available to them that they didn’t use, and it overwhelmingly contradicted their conclusions that Russia supported Trump.”
According to a source, Brennan and other intelligence agents “embellished” their Trump-Russia report by changing the categorization of sources that said Russia wanted Trump from unreliable to reliable.
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Shellenberger told Fox News host Jesse Watters on Thursday that there was a 50-page report exposing the operation that the CIA “is currently hiding at its headquarters.” According to Shellenberger, the controversy highlights two major intelligence scandals.
“The first one happened earlier in 2016, where our sources, multiple sources, tell us that Brennan oversaw the manipulation of our foreign allies to basically entrap Trump associates to create the pretext for the FBI investigation of Trump’s alleged collusion with Russia which is now debunked,” he said.
“The second thing is almost a year later Brennan orchestrates a phony intelligence assessment that comes to the opposite conclusion of what their own raw intelligence, their best intelligence was showing,” he added.
Trump was reportedly preparing to declassify information on the efforts to tie his campaign to Russia before leaving office but was unable to do so before President Joe Biden took office.