Obama’s CIA director John Brennan knew this and manufactured the evidence. He manipulated other assessments, buried high-quality intelligence, and then manufactured a conclusion that 17 agencies agreed Russia interfered in the 2016 elections to help Trump and then the press ran with it, and the country was brainwashed. According to these new reports, these were similar tactics the CIA used with the WMDs. This has severely wounded our body politic, warped our minds, and wrecked our trust in national security institutions. We deserve the full accounting of this hoax immediately, every document involved.
Thankfully Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger have made great progress and Mike joins us now.
Mike, tell us what this new cooking the books situation is really all about?
MICHAEL SHELLENBERGER: Sure, Jesse, it’s good to be with you. I think some people wonder if this is old news or maybe if this has been reported. I want to assure you it has not been reported until now. I can also assure you there are current members of the House Intelligence Committee that are unaware of a 50-page report that the CIA is currently hiding at its headquarters. There may be other copies elsewhere but there is a top secret copy at the CIA proving without a doubt according to our sources which are multiple credible sources that Russia, in fact, favored Hillary Clinton, not Donald Trump in 2016. That they used the Steele memo, the infamous political document commissioned by the Hillary Clinton campaign to cook the intelligence, as they said, for the early January 2017 intelligence community assessment claiming that the Russians favored Trump falsely. That relied on the Steele memo.
That 50-page report continues to exist. It likely exists with the other intelligence information including raw intelligence documents showing that the evidence was very strongly on the side, the best evidence, was on the side that the Russians favored Clinton for the continuity and stability, that they were concerned about Trump for being erratic, and being an unknown quantity, and that the quality of the evidence that contradicted that was much lower, and that Brennan’s people manipulated the sourcing, so to speak, the quality ranking given to the sources to come up with the opposite outcome of what the truth was.