#The ‘Russiagate’ games politicized US intelligence, too

Evidence continues to mount that Obama officials’ drive to conjure up the Russiagate “scandal” in order to cripple the Trump presidency went well beyond politicization of the Justice Department.

It now looks like then-CIA chief John Brennan drummed up a phony intelligence community “consensus” on Russian election meddling. In fact, two senior intel officials told RealClearInvestigations’ Paul Sperry, career analysts disputed Brennan’s conclusion that Vladimir Putin was intent on helping defeat Hillary Clinton, but the CIA director ignored them — making a political ally who donated to Hillary Clinton the report’s lead writer and personally editing a section of it himself.

Brennan’s report then helped justify the Russiagate investigation — which, after two years, found absolutely no collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.

Two weeks before Trump took office, the Obama administration released a declassified version of the report — “Intelligence Community Assessment on Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent Elections” — that the president’s critics have used ever since to undermine his legitimacy.

Two intel officials told Sperry that Brennan excluded “conflicting evidence about Putin’s motives.” Some career analysts found that Putin feared Trump as a “wild card” who wanted to expand the US military. They also noted that the Kremlin’s main purpose was “generally trying to sow discord and disrupt the American democratic process” — as it had meddled in the 2008 and 2012 campaigns.

Unlike most assessments, the report included no annex of dissent. But it did include an annex summarizing the infamous Christopher Steele dossier, which investigators had already determined was a joke.

And a sophisticated campaign of selective leaks to the media made it seem like Steele’s wild charges had some validity.

Sperry’s sources say “a number of analysts objected to including the dossier,” saying it was “not sound intelligence.” Brennan included it anyway.

House Intelligence Committee staff spent 1,200 hours reviewing how the assessment got put together. But the report was locked away after Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff became committee head in January 2019. Sperry’s sources have read the 50-page report — and one says it “makes it fairly clear the assessment was politicized and skewed to discredit Trump’s election.”

US Attorney John Durham is looking into all the dubious Russiagate games. The nation needs his report before Election Day.