"I'm Up Shit Creek"
... intelligence officials on December 8th, 2016 were prepared to release a Presidential Daily Briefing concluding that “Russian and criminal actors did not impact recent US election results by conducting malicious cyber activities against election infrastructure”:
That “did not impact” memo — exactly the opposite of what the Obama White House would claim a month later — never reached the public, thanks to the intervention of a senior official in Director of National Intelligence James Clapper’s office:
On the following day, December 9th, 2016, members of Obama’s National Security Principals Committee — including Clapper, CIA director John Brennan, Susan Rice, John Kerry, Brian McKeon, Loretta Lynch, Andrew McCabe, and Avril Haines — gathered for a meeting, after which each received an email titled, “POTUS Tasking on Russia Election Meddling.” The email tasked the members with the creation of a new “assessment per the President’s request.”
From that moment forward, intelligence officials began leaking “blatantly false” information about a nonexistent “secret assessment” that Russia intervened to influence the “outcome of the election.” This leaking continued unabated until January 6th, when a new, hastily-crafted Intelligence Community Assessment was released, triggering a series of developments that led to the publication of the Steele Dossier and an explosion of media stories linking Trump and Russia in an unprecedented scandal.The material is bolstered throughout by explanations of a whistleblower from then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper’s office. Just this handful of documents holds explosive implications, implicating a much bigger pool of White House officials than previously understood, including Obama himself, in what appears to be a top-down effort to create a false narrative about Russia meddling to help Donald Trump. If there’s an analog in American history, I can’t think of it.
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