The Narrative That Aided Russia’s Aims While Purporting to Expose Them.
Posted by Ed Folsom, July 26, 2025.
Without getting into the merits or lack of merit of recent DOJ criminal referrals for Barack Obama and other members of his administration over the Trump/Russia collusion flimflam they ran during Donald Trump’s first term, recently declassified intelligence materials make two things clear:
1.The narrative that Vladimir Putin had a “clear preference” for candidate Trump over candidate Clinton and that Putin “aspired to help” Trump defeat Clinton was cooked-up and promoted by the Obama administration, by use of an Intelligence Community Assessment with no legitimate basis; and
2.The cooking-up and promotion of this false narrative, and its related narrative that Trump colluded with Russia to “hack” the 2016 election, accomplished exactly what Vladmir Putin intended to accomplish, which was “to undermine faith in the US democratic process” and to “weaken,” by delegitimizing, the new president.
In other words, by cooking-up the fiction that the U.S. Intelligence Community had credible evidence that Putin clearly wanted Trump to win; that Putin meddled-in or “hacked” the 2016 election process, aspiring to help Trump win; and that Trump colluded with Russia in this regard, Obama and his persons-of-hench did the work of Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
The January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment.
On Friday, July 17, 2025, the Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, released previously classified materials pertaining to a January 5, 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment of Russian attempts to influence the 2016 presidential election. These materials demonstrate that, as of September 2016, the Intelligence Community was focused on foreign threats to “cyber infrastructure” related to the presidential election. At that point, they assessing that “foreign adversaries do not have and will probably not obtain the capabilities to successfully execute widespread and undetected cyber attacks” on election infrastructure. After Trump won the election, the Intelligence Community assessed that Russia had not interfered with election infrastructure. In early December of 2016, Obama was briefed on this assessment. He was not satisfied with it.
Obama ordered a new Intelligence Community Assessment dealing with all Russian attempts to influence the 2016 presidential election, not just with Russian attempts to launch cyber-attacks on election infrastructure. What resulted was a rushed, revised Intelligence Community Assessment, released just two weeks before Trump was sworn into office in January of 2017. The revised assessment stated:
“We assess with high confidence that Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign by summer 2016 aimed at the US presidential election, the consistent goals of which were to undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency. We further assess Putin and the Russian Government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump
…
We also assess Putin and the Russian Government aspired to help President-elect Trump’s election chances when possible by discrediting Secretary Clinton and publicly contrasting her favorably to him. CIA and FBI have high confidence in this judgment based on sensitive information not included in this version of the assessment; NSA has moderate confidence in this judgment based on the same sensitive information. NSA’s confidence would be elevated to high with additional corroborating sources.”
The January 2017 Assessment was immediately used to promote the narrative that Putin interfered in the 2016 election on Trump’s behalf.
Recently declassified reports debunking the “Putin interfered in the 2016 election to help Trump” and the “Trump colluded with Russia to hack the 2016 election” cons.
Recently, in early July, CIA Director John Ratcliffe declassified an internal CIA report pointing out various tradecraft problems with the January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment regarding Putin’s alleged preference for Trump, and criticizing the CIA’s role in including that assertion. Then, on Wednesday, July 23, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard released a newly declassified, September 18, 2020, report of the House Intelligence Committee, detailing that there was no legitimate basis to assess that Putin and the Russians “developed a clear preference” for Trump over Clinton or that Putin and the Russians “aspired to help” Trump defeat Clinton.
In fact, then-Director of the CIA, John Brennan, ignored the warnings of the five CIA intelligence analysts he picked to work with him on the project, that there was no legitimate basis to conclude Putin preferred Trump or that Putin “aspired to help” Trump, let alone to reach that assessment with high or moderate confidence. Brennan insisted on making the assertion anyway. The House Intelligence Committee report goes into extensive detail regarding the multiple problems with these assertions, and the multiple violations of Intelligence Community protocols that the Assessment’s authors committed in making them, including that:
- “The Director of CIA (DCIA) ordered the post-election publication of 15 reports containing previously collected but unpublished intelligence, three of which were substandard—containing information that was unclear, of uncertain origin, potentially biased, or implausible—and those became foundational sources for the ICA judgments that Putin preferred Trump over Clinton. The ICA misrepresented these reports as reliable, without mentioning their significant underlying flaws.” And
- “One scant, unclear, and unverifiable fragment of a sentence from one of the substandard reports constituted the only classified information cited to suggest Putin ‘aspired’ to help Trump win.”
Regarding the second of these two points, the report points out that the unverifiable sentence fragment was purportedly uttered in the runup to the Republican National Convention, at which point there was some question as to whether Trump would even win his party’s nomination to contend in the presidential race.
The House Intelligence Committee report also points out that the U.S. Intelligence Community had powerful evidence the Russians did not aspire to help Trump defeat Hillary. For one thing, the Intelligence Community knew that the Russians had major dirt on Hillary that they could have released before the election to help Trump. The Intelligence Community also had information that the Russians withheld this dirt because they expected Hillary to win the election and intended to leverage the information once she became president. This information included that:
-
Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) was in possession of a Clinton campaign email that discussed a plan that Hillary Clinton had approved “to link Putin and Russian hackers to candidate Trump in order to ‘distract the [American] public’ from the Clinton email scandal.” That’s right, Russian intelligence had an email from Clinton’s own campaign stating that she had approved a plan to link Putin and Russian hackers to Trump, to distract from her own email scandal. Now we know from Hillary Clinton’s own campaign where the Trump/Putin-election- “hacking” linkage came from, and why.
-
The SVR also had information from the Democratic National Committee (DNC), in September of 2016, that “President Obama and party leaders found the state of Secretary [of State] Clinton’s health to be extraordinarily alarming.”
-
DNC communications in the SVR’s possession said Hillary “suffered from ‘intensified psycho-emotional problems, including uncontrolled fits of anger, aggression and cheerfulness.’ Clinton was placed on a daily regimen of ‘heavy tranquilizers’ and while afraid of losing, she remained ‘obsessed with a thirst for power.’”
This was dirt that the Russians possessed before the 2016 election that they stole from Hillary’s own people. And yet they held it back, while purportedly aspiring to help Trump win.
Read the declassified reports yourselves.
I urge everyone to go ahead and read the newly declassified reports themselves. All that stuff about Putin interfering in the 2016 election to help Trump, and about Trump and Russia colluding to “hack” the 2016 election, was made up by Hillary Clinton (assisted by Christopher Steele and his “Steele Dossier”) and other members of Barack Obama’s Administration. And what was the effect? The effect was to undermine public faith in the legitimacy of a presidential election that was purportedly “hacked” by collusion between Trump and Russia, and to weaken Trump as sitting President of the U.S., just as Clinton, Obama and company intended, just as Russia intended.
Russia takes mighty strange propaganda positions for a country that prefers Trump.
In another irony, Annex A to the Intelligence Community Assessment of January 2017, is titled “(U) Russia — Kremlin’s TV Seeks To Influence Politics, Fuel Discontent in US, 11 December 2012.” This annex to the Assessment begins, “RT America TV, a Kremlin-financed channel operated from within the United States, has substantially expanded its repertoire of programming that highlights criticism of alleged US shortcomings in democracy and civil liberties.”
What, specifically was RT saying about the U.S.? Here are some of the things pointed out in Annex A to the January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment:
- In the runup to the 2012 election RT America TV introduced two new shows that “both overwhelmingly focused on criticism of US and Western governments as well as the promotion of radical discontent.”
- RT hosted one show in which “The RT hosts asserted that the US two-party system does not represent the views of at least one-third of the population and is a ‘sham.'”
- “RT aired a documentary about the Occupy Wall Street movement on 1, 2, and 4 November. RT framed the movement as a fight against ‘the ruling class’ and described the current US political system as corrupt and dominated by corporations. RT advertising for the documentary featured Occupy movement calls to ‘take back’ the government.”
- “RT’s reports often characterize the United States as a ‘surveillance state’ and allege widespread infringements of civil liberties, police brutality, and drone use.”
- “RT has also focused on criticism of the US economic system, US currency policy, alleged Wall Street greed, and the US national debt. Some of RT’s hosts have compared the United States to Imperial Rome and have predicted that government corruption and ‘corporate greed’ will lead to US financial collapse.”
- “RT runs anti-fracking programming, highlighting environmental issues and the impacts on public health. This is likely reflective of the Russian Government’s concern about the impact of fracking and US natural gas production on the global energy market and the potential challenges to Gazprom’s profitability.”
Stoking criticism of the West and promoting radical discontent; stoking criticism of the U.S. two-party system; promoting Occupy Wall Street’s criticisms of the ruling class and corporations; stoking criticism of the U.S. for purported infringements of civil liberties and police brutality; stoking criticism of the U.S. economic system (capitalism), Wall Street, and “corporate greed;” and stoking criticism of the environmental impacts of fracking – Why, could there be any surer sign that Putin and the Russians were pushing the Republican, Trump?
In all those years since 2016, who’s been zooming who? The declassified materials should give you a much better idea, versus any ideas you might previously have swallowed at the height of the agitprop campaign of mid-to-late 2016 through 2019.
Related Post, Jonathan Turley: https://jonathanturley.org/2025/08/01/the-reveal-the-public-is-finally-learning-how-democrats-pulled-off-the-greatest-political-trick-in-history/
