(Jacob Bruns, Headline USA) Journalists Michael Shellenberger and Matt Taibbi alleged in a recent Substack post that Obama-era CIA boss John Brennan altered a 2017 document to make it appear as if Russian President Vladimir Putin favored former President Donald Trump in the 2016 election, WND reported.
The document in question—the 2017 “Intelligence Community Assessment”—may, in fact, have indicated the opposite: that Putin preferred Democrat candidate Hillary Clinton in 2016.
According to one of Shellenberger’s unnamed sources, the ICA document made available to the public had been heavily manipulated.
“There was the top-secret version I was shown,” said the source. “There was an even more highly classified version that I was not shown, which had more details.”
The document bears the title “Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent U.S. Elections” and concludes that Putin “ordered” a propaganda campaign to “undermine public faith in the U.S. democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency.”
Then-President Barack Obama declassified the allegedly doctored version of the document during his final days in office.
That document, which former House Intelligence Chair Devin Nunes, R-Calif., referred to as the “Obama Dossier,” was weaponized against Trump in the subsequent Russia-collusion media blitz. Namely, it formed the basis of claims that the Trump campaign aligned itself with Russia in order to gain access to Democratic campaign strategies.
“In July 2015, Russian intelligence gained access to Democratic National Committee (DNC) networks and maintained that access until at least June 2016,” claimed the declassified ICA report, although the Mueller investigation would later determine that there was no meaningful collusion between Trump and Russia.
Shellenberger and Taibbi further argued that, lacking intelligence inside the Kremlin, there was no way of knowing with any certainty what Putin did or did not order at the time.
The journalists instead suggested that the CIA had, hidden away at its headquarters, the real report—a report that would fully vindicate Trump and implicate Clinton in the actual election-meddling scandal, involving the U.S. government.
The revelation was, however, not the first evidence that Brennan and others in the Obama inner circle abused their authority by weaponizing the deep state against the Republican leader.
Shellenberger and Taibbi—both red-pilled journalists, who became household names for their work on Elon Musk’s Twitter Files exposés—previously reported that Brennan had solicited the help of European intelligence agencies to target at least 26 Trump campaign officials ahead of the 2016 election.
They also hinted at the possibility of future reporting that would reveal that the Biden White House had colluded with the CIA in coordinating the ongoing lawfare attacks on Trump to interfere in the 2024 election.
