New Files Highlight Brennan’s Role Promoting Clinton’s Russia Collusion Narrative

The CIA was not seeking an FBI probe of Clinton; rather, it was pushing an investigation of Trump consistent with her baseless allegations.

O n Tuesday, Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe declassified and released parts of the documents underlying his earlier revelation about Hillary Clinton’s role in orchestrating the Trump-Russia collusion farce.

The new revelations are important, particularly in clarifying a suggestion, made last week by Ratcliffe, that U.S. intelligence agencies referred former Secretary of State Clinton to the FBI for investigation. That suggestion was then repeated by Senate Republicans and in media commentary (including my column, here).

There was no referral of that kind. That perhaps explains why, in his Senate testimony last week, former FBI director James Comey maintained that he recalled no such thing – to the seeming exasperation of Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.). In reality, when read in conjunction with other information that I addressed in Ball of Collusion, Ratcliffe’s disclosures underscore that the Obama administration, including its law-enforcement and intelligence agencies, was on the same page with the Clinton campaign in peddling the collusion narrative.

Ratcliffe’s revelation last week, in a letter to Senator Graham, related that, in late July 2016, Russian intelligence agents assessed that Clinton sought to blame Donald Trump, her opponent in the presidential race, for Russia’s suspected hacking of Democratic National Committee (DNC) emails. U.S. spy agencies “obtained insight” into this Russian assessment through some highly classified method. That explains, at least in part, why the documents Ratcliffe has disclosed are so heavily redacted (and probably why it has taken so long for the Trump administration to disclose this crucial information).

Clinton’s alleged objective was to divert attention from the scandal over her use of a non-secure homebrew server system to conduct State Department business. According to Ratcliffe, the U.S. intelligence community (IC) judged that the Russian assessment was authentic, in the sense that it really did come from the Kremlin’s intelligence services. The IC drew no conclusion, however, about whether the Russian government actually believed the assessment was true – i.e., as Ratcliffe put it, to some extent, “the Russian analysis may reflect exaggeration or fabrication.” For what it’s worth, I surmise that the Russians probably did believe Clinton had approved this political narrative because it lines up with contemporaneous events – it would not have taken a genius to figure it out. But that is a story for another day (coming soon).

In his letter to Graham, Ratcliffe elaborated that the existence of the Russian assessment was corroborated by two documents: (1) handwritten notes authored by Obama CIA Director John Brennan, who had briefed then-President Obama on the matter; and (2) what Ratcliffe described as “an investigative referral” to the FBI. The DNI indicated that the declassification of these documents (among other things) was under consideration. Parts have since been declassified and, on Tuesday, he disclosed them.

As I shall demonstrate, contrary to the (perhaps inadvertent) implication in Ratcliffe’s letter, the second document is not a referral requesting an investigation of Clinton. But let’s start with the Brennan notes, which indicate another discrepancy in Ratcliffe’s original letter: the incorrect dating of Clinton’s approval – which may be of only minor significance.

Brennan’s Notes

Brennan’s notes are said to document his briefing of Obama on the Russian assessment. There is no date given for this briefing, either in the notes or in Ratcliffe’s earlier letter to Graham. The heavily redacted notes suggest the possibility of communications among Brennan, Obama (referred to as “POTUS”), and three Obama officials identified as “JC,” “Denis” and “Susan.” It is certainly possible that these are references, respectively, to the FBI’s then-director James Comey, Obama chief of staff Denis McDonough, and Obama national security adviser Susan Rice, but Ratcliffe has not confirmed this. Because the relevant portions are blacked out, we cannot say whether Brennan’s notes reflect statements by, or observations about, JC, Denis and Susan.

Ratcliffe’s letter to Graham said that Clinton allegedly green-lighted the scheme to blame Trump on July 26, 2016. To this observer, Brennan’s notes appear to date the alleged approval on July 28, 2016. To be sure, Brennan’s penmanship is not crystal clear, so I wouldn’t bet the ranch on this – and, obviously, Ratcliffe has access to intelligence files not available to the rest of us.

Brennan’s notes appear to state: “We’re gaining additional insight into Russian activities from” – after which at least three or four lines, presumably referring to the source of the information, are blacked out. The notes then continue:

Cite alleged approval by Hillary Clinton on 28 July of a proposal from one of her foreign policy advisors to villify [sic] Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by the Russian security services.

There is an annotation next to this note, in the left margin. Such margin notes are where, in other places, Brennan appears to refer to people involved in the briefing (POTUS, JC, Denis and Susan). But on the above excerpted note, the annotation is redacted.

So are all the other assertions in the notes, with the exception of one that is attributed to “POTUS” (Obama), stating “Any evidence of collaboration between Trump campaign & Russians.” The salience of this is unclear – we don’t know whether Obama was asking a question or making a suggestion; we don’t know if Brennan is recording a statement the president made or an impression Brennan himself formed. We only know that, while most of the notes are redacted, Ratcliffe decided this statement could and should be disclosed.

That statement is one of three bullet points in the “POTUS” section of Brennan’s notes; the other two are redacted. Similarly blacked out are all the remaining bullet points attributed to (or related to) other briefing participants. Next to JC, there appear to be at least five bullet points. One bullet point is next to Denis. With respect to Susan, there appear to be five bullet points, and there is an asterisk written next to the third one – but, of course, we have no idea why (or why Ratcliffe included the asterisk but redacted the note it referred to).

Finally, it is worth observing that the Brennan notes Ratcliffe has disclosed appear to be two pages culled from a larger set. The pages are numbered “5” and “6.” There seems to be a header at the top of both pages that has also been blacked out. It is always risky to speculate, but I surmise that the CIA director’s meeting with the president and other officials involved other sensitive topics that have nothing to do with Clinton’s role in the Trump-Russia narrative, and have thus been withheld.

The So-Called Investigative Referral

In last week’s letter to Graham, Ratcliffe used the label “investigative referral” for what he further described as a communication, dated September 7, 2016, from what he called “U.S. intelligence officials” to two top FBI officials, then-director Comey and Peter Strzok, who was then a top counterintelligence agent (and, like Comey, has since been fired).

When we hear the term “investigative referral” in connection with a communication to the nation’s top federal law-enforcement agency, it usually indicates that another agency is passing along information that, it believes, warrants a criminal investigation by the FBI, with an eye toward prosecution by the Justice Department. That is not what this document is.

In fact, it is a memorandum from the CIA to the FBI, providing information previously requested by the FBI. The memo is on CIA letterhead, but no particular CIA official is identified as the author. Probably for reasons of agency-to-agency protocol, it is addressed to Comey, but directed to the “attention” of Strzok. There is also a request in the body of the memo that a copy be provided to another FBI agent whose name has been redacted. The CIA states that it is providing the information in the memo “per FBI verbal request” – I’d surmise: a request either by Strzok or by the unidentified FBI agent working under Strzok’s supervision.

Significantly, the information is described as having been generated by the “CROSSFIRE HURRICANE fusion cell.”

As we know, Crossfire Hurricane was the codename that the FBI gave the Trump-Russia investigation when it was formally opened at the end of July 2016 – which so happens to have been exactly the time when Hillary Clinton is said to have approved the plan to blame Donald Trump for Russia’s hacking of the DNC emails.

I argued in Ball of Collusion that the Trump-Russia probe was not just an FBI investigation. It was based on several strands of intelligence, much of it from foreign intelligence agencies, that came into the CIA. In the early stages, Brennan was the main driver; the FBI’s role became more consequential in the latter stages (particularly when FISA warrants were sought).

By Brennan’s own account, outlined in his congressional testimony and public statements, he played the role of a clearinghouse. That is, he took information from foreign services, put his own analytical spin on it, and packaged it for the FBI. As Brennan put it in House testimony:

I was aware of intelligence and information about contacts between Russian officials and U.S. persons that raised concerns in my mind about whether or not those individuals were cooperating with the Russians, either in a witting or unwitting fashion, and it served as the basis for the FBI investigation to determine whether such collusion – cooperation occurred.

I further explained in the book that, among the vehicles by which Brennan funneled information to the bureau, was “an interagency task force, comprised on the domestic side by the FBI, the Justice Department, and the Treasury Department, and on the foreign-intelligence side by the CIA, the NSA, and the Office of National Intelligence Director James Clapper,” with the Obama White House also kept in the loop. Brennan was the catalyst, and the main FBI player in this arrangement was Strzok.

The reference in the CIA memo to the “Crossfire Hurricane fusion cell” is clearly to this interagency task force arrangement, through which the CIA fed information it gleaned from U.S. foreign intelligence operations to the FBI.

We know from Ratcliffe’s letter that American intelligence agencies somehow got access to the afore-described Russian intelligence assessment. The memo disclosed yesterday indicates that the CIA passed this information along to the FBI. In pertinent part, it states:

3. [Redacted] Per FBI verbal request, CIA provides the below examples of information the CROSSFIRE HURRICANE fusion cell has gleaned to date [Source revealing information redacted]:

a. [A few words redacted] An exchange [about a line of text redacted] discussing US presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s approval of a plan concerning US presidential candidate Donald Trump and Russian hackers hampering US elections as a means of distracting the public from her use of a private email server.

Another couple of lines are redacted before passage 3a continues with a description (from non-classified “open sources”) of “Guccifer 2.0,” a hacking enterprise which the CIA believed to be “tied to Russian intelligence,” and which had claimed responsibility for hacking the DNC.

To be clear, this is not a request that the FBI conduct an investigation of Mrs. Clinton. To the contrary, it is a formal communication of information gathered in connection with a then-ongoing U.S. government effort to try to establish exactly what Clinton was alleging: a Trump-Russia conspiracy.

Lest we forget, in late August, shortly before the CIA crafted this memo, Brennan briefed a close Clinton ally, then Senate minority leader Harry Reid (D., Nev.), regarding Russia’s interference in the election. Reid immediately fired off a letter to Comey, complaining that the FBI seemed to be ignoring “the evidence of a direct connection between the Russian government and Donald Trump’s presidential campaign [that] continues to mount.” Reid then made explicit reference to reporting claiming that Trump campaign adviser Carter Page had met in Moscow with high-ranking members of Putin’s regime — debunked reporting that we now know came from Christopher Steele, the former British spy retained by the Clinton campaign to dig up (or, as it turned out, manufacture) Russian dirt on Trump.

Summary

To summarize what happened here, in late July 2016, at precisely the time our spy services learned that Russian intelligence was saying Hillary Clinton was scheming to blame the DNC hacking on a Trump-Russia conspiracy, the FBI formally opened the Crossfire Hurricane investigation — on the theory that the Trump campaign may have conspired in Russia’s hacking of the DNC emails.

And in September 2016, around the time Brennan was nudging Reid to pressure Comey to aggressively investigate a possible Trump-Russia conspiracy to interfere in the 2016 election, the CIA was formally providing the FBI with a memo outlining that Clinton (who was expected to be the next president) wanted Trump investigated for conspiring with Russian hackers to interfere in the 2016 election — which, conveniently, could distract the voters’ attention from her own email scandal. This was information the FBI already had but, according to Reid, was not acting on.

Within days of getting the CIA memo, the FBI began preparations to apply to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court for a warrant to monitor Carter Page. After describing the July publication of DNC emails which it accused Russia of hacking, the bureau’s FISA warrant application stated: “The FBI believes that the Russian Government’s efforts are being coordinated with Page and perhaps other individuals associated with [Donald Trump’s] campaign.”

The CIA did not want the FBI to investigate Hillary Clinton. The CIA — with the Obama White House and Reid in the loop — wanted the FBI to act on Hillary Clinton’s unfounded allegation that Donald Trump had conspired with Russia to hack the DNC. And the FBI willingly obliged. Because it had no actual evidence implicating Trump in Russia’s cyberespionage operations, the FBI had to rely on the Clinton campaign-sponsored Steele dossier, which either made up that allegation out of whole cloth or based it on disinformation from a “primary subsource” who, it turns out, the FBI suspected was a Russian asset.

Astonishing.