Former CIA analysts say the intelligence community is suffering another major hit to its credibility following the release of newly declassified material alleging that top Obama administration officials intentionally misled the public into believing President Trump colluded with Russia to win the 2016 election.
The documents, declassified by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and submitted to the Justice Department for potential criminal referrals, highlight what analysts describe as the growing politicization and weaponization of the intelligence apparatus—beginning under President Obama and continuing into the Biden administration, the Washington Times reported on Saturday.
Gabbard alleges that senior Obama officials fabricated a false intelligence assessment on Russian interference just weeks after the 2016 election, and she is calling for those responsible to be held accountable for using the report to undermine the incoming Trump administration, the Times noted.
According to Gabbard, those involved include former President Obama, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, former CIA Director John Brennan, and former FBI Director James Comey. After the release of the reports, Clapper said during an interview that he has “lawyered up.”
Fred Fleitz, a former CIA analyst who spent nearly two decades with the spy agency, told the Times he thinks “the whole thing really undermined the reputation of U.S. intelligence, not just CIA.”
“It made it look like it’s a big political game. There’s always some politics, but it was never as bad as it was until Trump became president,” he said, citing alleged partisan misuse of intelligence by then-Rep. Adam Schiff, California Democrat, and Brennan.
“There always [were] some guardrails that people wouldn’t cross, but they were all broken when Trump became president, and I still don’t think it’s recovered,” he said.
Since her announcement, Gabbard said whistleblowers from within the intelligence community have been “coming out of the woodwork” to share additional information about what occurred.
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“We have whistleblowers … coming forward now, after we released these documents because there are people who were around, who were working within the intelligence community who are so disgusted by what happened,” Gabbard said recently on Fox News. “We’re starting to see some of them come out of the woodwork here because they, too, like you and I and the American people, want to see justice delivered.”
Fleitz told the Times his friends and acquaintances within the intelligence community “really despise Mr. Brennan.”
“I think he was a political hack who did a lot of damage to the agency, not just with this Intelligence Community Assessment [ICA], and with his promotion of the Steele dossier, [named after British MI6 officer Christopher Steele], but with years of political commentary on MSNBC attacking Trump,” he said.
“As a former CIA officer, that’s just not done. It’s not dignified, and it really angered Trump, and it made Trump distrust American intelligence even more,” Fleitz told the outlet.
Last week, the Department of Justice confirmed that it has received a criminal referral from Gabbard regarding her explosive allegations that the Obama-era officials “manufactured and politicized intelligence” to construct the narrative of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.
On Friday, Gabbard released a series of unclassified documents that she claims contain “overwhelming evidence” showing that then-President Obama and his national security team laid the foundation for the years-long Trump-Russia collusion investigation following Trump’s victory over former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in 2016.
Following the referral, FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino posted a cryptic message to his official X account Saturday that appeared to suggest there is a massive and highly secretive level of corruption throughout the federal government.
“The Director and I are committed to stamping out public corruption and the political weaponization of both law enforcement and intelligence operations,” the post continues. “It is a priority for us. But what I have learned in the course of our properly predicated and necessary investigations into these aforementioned matters, has shocked me down to my core. We cannot run a Republic like this. I’ll never be the same after learning what I’ve learned.”
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