Will Obama’s Coup d’état Bring Consequences to the Deep State?
By Hunter DeRensis
Any street magician will tell you that the key to any trick is drawing attention to one hand, while you masquerade with the other. Hot on the heels of the Trump administration’s denial of the existence of a Jeffrey Epstein “client list,” and outrage by the conservative grassroots over an apparent cover-up of the once widely-acknowledged sex trafficking ring, the White House is spotlighting new, supplemental information about the origins of the 2016 Trump-Putin espionage conspiracy.
As obvious as this PR diversion is, it doesn’t diminish the enormity of the “Russiagate” scandal, or the importance of these new releases: the national security state framed their commander-in-chief as a form of soft coup d’état, to either force him from office outright or neutralize his political potency.
“They manufactured findings from shoddy sources, they suppressed evidence and credible intelligence that disproved their false claims, they disobeyed traditional tradecraft intelligence community standards, and withheld the truth from the American people,”
Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard during a White House press briefing on July 23.
Even during her time as a Democratic congresswoman, Gabbard was one of the few to buck her party’s narrative and accurately assess that the claims of collusion between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin were baseless.
Her declassification of a staff oversight report produced in September 2020 by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence has strengthened that conclusion, while for the first time redirecting ultimate culpability for the scheme. “The evidence that we have found and that we have released directly point to President Obama leading the manufacturing of this intelligence assessment,” Gabbard told the assembled press.
Much like the manufactured 2002 hysteria over the false claim of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) in Iraq, the tactic of the Deep State opposition and their abettors in the corporate press and Democratic Party in 2016-17 was to overwhelm the media landscape with noise, disorienting the public. Washington Post headline after Rachel Maddow segment, readers and viewers were gorged on lurid tales of Trump Tower meetings, Vermont energy grids, bot farms, “pee tapes, Manchurian candidates, Deutsche Bank servers, and “obstruction of justice.”
Four G Media Contributor Hunter DeRensis
Lost in all of that nonsense was the original claim that the whole conspiracy was staked on: Russian GRU intelligence hacked the emails of the Democratic National Committee and passed them to Wikileaks to damage the presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton and benefit the election odds of Donald Trump.
But here’s the most important fact, one that turns everything else into smoke: there has never existed evidence on the technical level that the Russian government—or any individuals from or located in Russia—hacked the Democratic National Committee or smuggled their internal emails to Wikileaks.
FBI forensics never examined the DNC servers. Instead, the task was given to the Democrat-friendly cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, whose suppositional, third-party findings were adopted by the U.S. government. Even then-FBI Director James Comey had to admit during subsequent Senate testimony that this was not preferred practice.
Why only suppositional? Shawn Henry, the head of CrowdStrike, gave closed door testimony to the U.S. House Intelligence Committee in December 2017 that was only made public in May 2020. “There’s no evidence that they [the emails] were actually exfiltrated. There’s circumstantial evidence,” Henry conceded, “but no evidence that they were actually exfiltrated.”
Read: no material evidence on the hardware of a hack via remote access, by Russia or any other outside actor.
Some, including former intelligence officials, have theorized that this indicates an internal leak at the DNC, with the emails being removed in-person on a thumb drive. (This would also conform to the story given by Julian Assange and the Wikileaks staff, who’ve always denied that Russia was their source.) But putting alternative theories aside, what matters is that Russian culpability was always guesswork.
On January 6, 2017, the U.S. government published what DNI James Clapper would refer to as a “special intelligence community assessment” (ICA) on supposed Russian election interference. Contrary to the media narrative at the time, this ICA was not an equivalent to a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) and did not represent the “unanimous conclusion” of the U.S. intelligence community.
An NIE is a coordinated assessment with input from all seventeen U.S. intelligence agencies across the federal government and includes both affirmations and dissensions from the conclusion if they exist. (The 2002 NIE on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, in addition to using falsified intelligence, infamously removed dissension from the final product.)
The ICA was a 25-page report—with a seven-page attack on RT (reheated from 2012) added as an appendix for good measure—produced with input from only four agencies: DNI, FBI, CIA, and NSA. Further, its findings were formulated by “hand-picked” analysts, Clapper’s words, instead of through the normal process.
When you hand pick the analysts, you can hand pick the results. Did Vladimir Putin intervene in the election to support Donald Trump? “CIA and FBI have high confidence in this judgment; NSA has moderate confidence,” the ICA concluded.
The National Security Agency collects and tracks all global communications and internet activity. (Clapper perjured himself, denying as much in front of Congress in 2013.) If metadata existed proving a Russian hack on the DNC, they would possess it. Yet they only stamped this contrived report with only “moderate” confidence, which means they’ve got nothing.
Now, thanks to Gabbard’s declassification of an assessment shared around the intelligence community in September 2016, we can see the government’s empty hands in full view:
“FBI and NSA, however, have low confidence in the attribution of the data leaks to Russia…They agree that the disclosures appear consistent with what we might expect from Russian influence activities, but note that we lack sufficient technical details to correlate the information posted online to Russian state-sponsored actors.
”Further, we’ve learned that production of the ICA came at the impetus, not from Clapper working on his own initiative, but from a private meeting with lame duck President Barack Obama—what Gabbard labeled a “treasonous conspiracy”—with the specific instruction that it be published before Trump entered the Oval Office.
The House oversight report reveals, “unlike routine IC analysis, the ICA was a high-profile product ordered by the President, directed by senior IC agency heads, and created by just five analysts, using one principal drafter. Production of the ICA was subject to unusual directives from the President and senior political appointees, and particularly [Brennan].
”CIA Director John Brennan personally ensured that both unverified and discredited intelligence, including from the scurrilous Steele dossier, were included. “Contradicting public claims by the DCIA [Brennan] that the dossier ‘was not in any way’ incorporated into the ICA, the dossier was referenced in the ICA main body text and further detailed in a two-page ICA annex,” the House report continues.
Confronted by this deception, a lower CIA officer informed the House committee, Brennan responded, “Yes, but doesn’t it ring true?” This is the same man who not only provided a rear guard defense of torture, but oversaw the distribution of U.S. military aid to Syrian jihadists allied to Al Qaeda.
Why lie? Why invent “Russiagate”? Because Donald Trump had the audacity to be elected without Washington’s mandate of Heaven. The Russia collusion hoax always would have had to be invented: to kneecap an incoming president with unknown intentions, delegitimize the new electoral realignment, and poison a rapprochement with Russia that could have avoided a global crisis like the current war in Ukraine.
Years ago, it gave Washington high society the vapors when Senator Rand Paul (R-KY)
suggested that John Brennan shouldn’t be receiving a government pension because of his underhandedness. Now the Justice Department is reviewing whether to bring criminal charges against Brennan—along with Clapper, Comey, and even former President Obama.
The American electorate, on both sides of the aisle, is starved for political accountability after decades of malfeasance, brazen criminality, and betrayal of the public trust. A nation that was determined to shore up its crumbling institutions, preserve domestic stability, and undercut political radicalism would give life imprisonment to Brennan, Clapper, Comey, and several dozen other bad actors.
But the United States is not a serious country—at least right now. None of these men will see the inside of a jail cell.