Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard allegedly smacked CIA officials back in their place — metaphorically speaking — along with folks from a few other agencies under her purview for trying to redact more “sensitive information” from her July release of documents concerning “Russiagate,” anonymous sources said in a report from The Washington Post.
The report revealed that officials were supposedly terrified that the version of a House report concerning the 2016 presidential election, which was published by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), contained “top-secret spying techniques and sources.”
Or, maybe, these clandestine individuals simply didn’t want anyone to find out the Obama administration, in cahoots — yes, I said “cahoots” — with Hillary Clinton, a twice failed Democratic presidential candidate, to prevent President Donald Trump from setting up shop in the White House.
Officials wanted Gabbard to submit a more redacted version of the report to be released upon approval of the president. She decided to err on the side of being transparent to the American people. You should never fully trust an individual who works in the federal government, but those who you can usually give a teeny, tiny portion of trust to are those who want to be open about what’s going on, especially when folks within the government are guilty of bad behavior.
Check out further details from The Daily Caller:
The report in question was a 2020 review of the Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) on “Russia’s Influence Campaign Targeting the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election” by the House Intelligence Committee (HPSCI) which found senior intelligence officials suppressed evidence that countered the narrative that Russia preferred Trump over Hillary Clinton.
The findings counter claims that intelligence officials previously leaked to the WaPo. The only classified information referenced in the ICA to demonstrate Putin’s preference towards Trump is one “scant, unclear, and unverifiable fragment of a sentence from one of these substandard reports,” according to the HPSCI review. While the report cited the response of “Democratic lawmakers” and “former Democratic officials,” the WaPo primarily relied upon “multiple people familiar with the matter” for the crux of its article.
The “multiple people” cited to support the thesis of the article consisted of “one person familiar with how the report was released,” “a person familiar with the process” and “current and former U.S. officials.” WaPo said the sources were anonymous “because of the matter’s sensitivity.”
The Post then provided a quote from a source that was only referred to as a “person familiar with the process” concerning how the file was released. That same individual stated the report went through several reviews by officials within the intelligence community and a group of ODNI attorneys.
Both current and former officials say that Gabbard tried hard to have as much of the document publicized as she could. Again, this shows a dedication, at least on some level, to transparency within the government, particularly, the intelligence community. We need more of that.
“CIA put forward their proposed redactions and edits to the document,” a person familiar said in a conversation with WaPo. The same source then explained that Gabbard has greater “declassification authority” than other agencies and she’s not “required to get their approval prior to release.”
Ultimately, Trump approved Gabbard’s version of the report with “minimal redactions and no edits.”
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