The dubious intelligence report that fueled the Trump-Russia hoax.

“There is no serious person out there who would suggest that you could even rig America’s elections.” Former United States President Barack Obama made that statement at an Oct. 18, 2016, press conference, just weeks before the presidential election. “There is no evidence that that has happened in the past, or that there are instances that that could happen this time,” he continued.

Search news stories prior to November 2016, and you’ll return to a time when candidate Donald Trump was hinting that Hillary Clinton supporters might rig the 2016 election, and liberal politicians and journalists trashed him for it, 24-hour news cycle after 24-hour news cycle. They insisted it was impossible. They demanded that he take back his insinuations. They said his insinuations were deadly dangerous to democracy.

Then they lost.

Adjust your search parameters to post-November 2016, and “rigging the election” search results are much different from a few weeks and months earlier. Millions of search results come back that accuse Trump supporters and Donald Trump himself of “rigging the election.” To this day, the leftist media almost completely ignores former President Obama’s “no serious person” assertion. Why? Because Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election.

President Donald Trump during the 58th U.S. Presidential Inauguration after he was sworn in as the 45th President of the United States of America. Samuel Corum/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

After Mr. Trump won, we were suddenly told that the election was rigged, American democracy was under attack, and the president was an agent of Russian President Vladimir Putin. The radical left refused to accept the election results.

On Dec. 9, 2016, then President Obama ordered a review into Russian meddling in the presidential election. In one of his final presidential press conferences, Obama said that he wanted the report on Russian interference finished before he left office on Jan. 20, 2017: “When the report comes out, before I leave office, that will have drawn together all the threads. And so, I don’t want to step on their work ahead of time” (emphasis added throughout).

The same day Mr. Obama ordered the review, on December 9, the Washington Post already knew the outcome. It published several articles saying that Russia attempted to get Trump elected. The articles were based on the testimony of anonymous “officials” at the Central Intelligence Agency.

A Washington Post article titled “Secret CIA Assessment Says Russia Was Trying to Help Trump Win White House” stated:

The cia has concluded in a secret assessment that Russia intervened in the 2016 election to help Donald Trump win the presidency, rather than just to undermine confidence in the U.S. electoral system, according to officials briefed on the matter. … “It is the assessment of the intelligence community that Russia’s goal here was to favor one candidate over the other, to help Trump get elected,” said a senior U.S. official briefed on an intelligence presentation made to U.S. senators. “That’s the consensus view.”

On Dec. 11, 2016, the New York Times editorial board ran “Russia’s Hand in America’s Election,” which stated:

In Mr. Trump, the Russians had reason to see a malleable political novice, one who had surrounded himself with Kremlin lackeys. … At the urging of Democratic lawmakers, President Obama has asked the director of national intelligence to conduct a “full review” of Russia’s hidden hand in the election, the White House announced Friday. The inquiry, which is to be completed before Mr. Trump is sworn in on January 20, is an important, if belated, step.

The same day Obama asked for the review to be carried out, America’s biggest media outlets ran stories covering the basic conclusions of the report. The report was essentially finished before it officially started. Why? Because its investigators were biased, and they were basing their investigation on the biased, unconfirmed claims in the dossier of former British spy Christopher Steele. (Additionally, Steele’s work was funded by the Clinton campaign.) The first line of the Steele dossier reads: “Russian regime has been cultivating, supporting and assisting Trump for at least five years.”

The report was propaganda to continue peddling the conspiracy theory and divert attention from the real crime: Obama’s Department of Justice was using its power to illegally spy on American citizens and the Trump campaign and, in that sense, rig the election.

Former United States President Barack Obama Leigh Vogel/WireImage

Obama went from saying, “There is no serious person out there who would suggest that you could even rig America’s elections,” to saying, “Russia rigged the U.S. election.”

On Jan. 5, 2017, U.S. intelligence leaders briefed President Obama on their findings before making the report public. The 25-page report, titled “Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent U.S. Elections,” contained a two-page summary of Christopher Steele’s dossier. In the public version of the report, that two-page section was redacted.

The day after Obama was briefed on the report, January 6, fbi director James Comey briefed President-elect Donald Trump. But he briefed the president only on parts of the report, including the “salacious” gossip contained in the dossier. He lied to the president, telling him he was not under investigation.

One of the key assessments in the report appears on page 1: “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 unfavorably to him. All three agencies agree with this judgment. cia and fbi have high confidence in this judgment; nsa has moderate confidence.”

Former British spy Christopher Steele Getty Images

This line was taken straight from the Steele dossier. Steele’s gossip now had the “credibility” it had lacked in order for the media to write about it. Citing an official government report as a source is more “credible” than citing the unverified Steele dossier itself. Now the media could run the Trump-Russia collusion narrative, ad nauseam.

Notice that the nsa had “moderate confidence” in the assessment. The head of the nsa at that time was Mike Rodgers. After the report came out, Rodgers essentially disappeared. Meanwhile, the heads of the cia and director of national intelligence, John Brennan and James Clapper respectively, were paraded around on cable news. (Brennan and Clapper now work for msnbc and cnn, respectively.)

In an April 2017 article for the Federalist, former cia employee Fred Fleitz wrote that the Jan. 6, 2017, assessment “was very unusual because it was such a conclusive analysis of a very controversial subject with no dissenting views.”

“Based on my cia experience,” he continued, “this is unprecedented and makes me wonder whether intelligence agencies that may have dissented were deliberately excluded.”

In “The Steele Dossier Has Been Discredited—Is the IC Report Next?” Julie Kelly called the January 6 Intelligence Community Assessment an “embarrassment to U.S. intelligence services.” She wrote:

Reeling from Trump’s shocking win and desperate to place blame, Obama in early December 2016 ordered a full review of Russia’s election meddling. Twenty days later, the review was completed—hardly sufficient time for an adequate investigation of how a global adversary infiltrated a U.S. presidential election that cost more than $2 billion and involved 130 million American voters. Nonetheless, in less than three weeks, the agencies claimed to have collected and verified reports from “multiple sources” to affirm their findings.

The American public was led to believe that Russia had carried out a massive attack on America’s electoral process. Some Democrats said Russia’s interference was the worst attack on America since the September 11 terrorist attacks. But somehow, in under three weeks, the government had already connected and “verified” all the dots and completed an intelligence report.

Barack Obama ignored the warning signs before the election. In the previous election campaign, he had mocked opponent Mitt Romney for saying that America’s “number one geopolitical foe” was Russia. Obama said he was “stuck in a Cold War mind warp” and that “the 1980s are calling to ask for their foreign policy back.” When his White House cybersecurity coordinator warned of Russian interference and began developing countermeasures, he was told to stand down.

Not until Donald Trump won did the Obama administration start to care about Russia. The 2016 election was over, Trump had won, and the pendulum wildly swung in the other direction. Obama went from saying, “There is no serious person out there who would suggest that you could even rig America’s elections,” to saying, “Russia rigged the U.S. election.”

Then the Obama administration, at the behest of Barack Obama himself, compiled the Jan. 6, 2017, Intelligence Community Assessment—essentially the government’s very own in-house Steele dossier. The conclusions of the report were leaked the day it was started because it was built around Steele’s dossier, which many people in the government already had.

Notice some of the content contained in the report, as Kelly wrote in her article:

The hastily prepared report is akin to a last-minute term paper, carefully formatted with plenty of white space and graphics. Odd anecdotes are stitched together in a hodgepodge manner. It’s filled with repetition and hearsay. One vague passage insists that Putin “holds a grudge for comments [by Clinton] he almost certainly saw as disparaging him.” Another factoid is that a Putin pal said Russia would “drink champagne” if Trump won. Not exactly the kind of conjecture that would pass muster in a court of law. The document was released in declassified form; readers repeatedly are assured that highly classified information supports the Intelligence Community’s conclusions but that “the release of such information would reveal sensitive sources or methods and imperil the ability to collect critical foreign intelligence in the future.” (Where have we heard that before?) It strained to make a connection between the Kremlin, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, and the hacking of the Democratic National Committee. More than half of the report’s substance detailed how RT America, the Kremlin’s English-speaking news channel, sought to undermine the U.S. presidential election—in 2012. A seven-page “annex” to the report offered a completely irrelevant analysis of RT’s news coverage before Mitt Romney lost to Barack Obama on Nov. 6, 2012. Outdated references to Occupy Wall Street, fracking, and the Georgia-Russia conflict are cited. Weird memes and pictures fill a big chunk of four pages.

The report is mostly outdated articles, secondhand gossip, preconceived conclusions based on political bias, and, peppered throughout, bits about how the Democratic National Committee’s e-mails were hacked. Most of the content isn’t even about the 2016 presidential election.

Read the report for yourself. It would be comical if the motive behind it wasn’t so diabolical. And of course, you’re not allowed to see any of the underlying evidence. You’re supposed to take Brennan’s and Clapper’s word that the assessments are backed by concrete evidence. “Just trust us,” they said.

The report was part of the echo chamber. The Obama administration used this deceptive technique throughout its entire eight years. Ben Rhodes, the president’s national security adviser, admitted that tactic when it came to manufacturing support for the Iran nuclear deal. Is there any reason we should believe that administration? It made up stories, easily got willing journalists to circulate those stories, then rubber-stamped the news stories with the government’s seal of approval.

In the case of the Jan. 6, 2017, report, Barack Obama was the one driving the effort. You could call it the “Obama dossier.”

Notice what former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said in an interview on July 18, 2018:

If it weren’t for President Obama, we might not have done the Intelligence Community Assessment that we did that set off a whole sequence of events which are still unfolding today, notably, Special Counsel Mueller’s investigation. President Obama is responsible for that, and it was he who tasked us to do that Intelligence Community Assessment in the first place. I think that’s an important point when it comes to critiquing President Obama.

This directive came straight from the top. Mr. Obama’s actions ignited the “whole sequence of events,” a sequence that almost tore the U.S. government apart.

Mr. Obama asked for a report on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. That report barely addressed the 2016 election aside from reemphasizing the key points of Steele’s dossier. America’s intelligence agencies are supposed to be the best information-gathering agencies in the world. Yet here’s another example of those agencies taking highly politicized bias and presenting it as if it is factual intelligence.

In an interview on March 25, Clapper said, “John Brennan and Jim Comey and I are part of the group that were tasked by President Obama to put together all the reporting we had on the Russian interference. [W]hich we did.”

(L to R) Former FBI Director James Comey, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and former CIA Director John Brennan

It is constitutional for the president to ask his executive branch agencies to conduct reviews like this. But when you look at the shoddy work, the lack of evidence, the information leaks, the use of the Clinton campaign-funded Steele dossier, and the timing, you realize that the Obama intelligence departments were used as political weapons. The Obama administration basically took false rumors and stamped them with the credibility of the cia and fbi.

Intelligence agencies are supposed to function as providers of information and security, not as political weapons of a political party or a president. It’s like a sheriff using the money, manpower and resources of the sheriff’s office to surveil, harass and otherwise prevent an opponent from being elected sheriff.

U.S. Attorney General William Barr Getty Images

The Obama administration used more than just the intelligence agencies as political weapons.

On May 1, U.S. Attorney General William Barr testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee and said that “we have to stop using the criminal justice process as a political weapon.”

In his August cover story, Trumpet editor in chief Gerald Flurry wrote, “The Obama administration had a vice grip on the law and intelligence departments.” The president is the leader of those departments, but when he uses those agencies for political ends, he is not only abusing his power, he is destroying American democracy!

During the Obama administration, the United States was in the midst of a constitutional crisis. Now there’s a man heading the Department of Justice who says he “reveres” the Constitution.

In order to remain impartial, powerful federal agencies like the cia and fbi must operate with a certain degree of autonomy and as far away from the political spectrum as possible. The Fourth Amendment of the Constitution prohibits those agencies from targeting Americans without “probable cause.” One of the worst scandals of Spygate is how the Obama “deep state” crafted the “probable cause” it needed in order to target its opposition.

Mr. Obama said often that he respected the “independence” of those agencies. He said in his Dec. 16, 2016, press conference:

One thing that I have done is to be pretty scrupulous about not wading into investigation decisions or prosecution decisions or decisions not to prosecute. I have tried to be really strict in my own behavior about preserving the independence of law enforcement, free from my own judgements and political assessments, in some cases. And I don’t know why it would stop now.

Law enforcement must be free from a politician’s judgments and political assessments, and based solely on facts, evidence and law. But the man who said these words had his intelligence agencies producing a highly politicized intelligence assessment that was presented to the American public without concrete evidence for the purpose of changing their perception and actions toward not only a rival political candidate but an elected president. The facts that have remained since that assessment was released have completely debunked its most contentious assessment: “We also assess Putin and the Russian government aspired to help President-elect Trump’s election chances when possible ….”

The Jan. 6, 2017, assessment was intended to provide more fuel to anti-Trump media and politicians. It was designed to force the Trump administration to divert time and resources to fight the accusations. And it was designed to cover up what the radical left was doing before, during and after the 2016 election. The best way to interfere with an election and get away with it, they decided, was to accuse the opposition of interfering in an election and getting away with it.

My father wrote:

Robert Mueller ran a massive investigation for two years into whether President Trump colluded with Russia. He found no wrongdoing by the president—but he inadvertently unveiled a great deal of corruption by [President Trump’s] enemies! Now the new attorney general, William Barr, is doing some investigating of his own. So, we are going to learn even more about just how deep the rot goes.

Obama had a powerful grip over those agencies. Even before Mr. Trump entered the White House, he had to battle the immense power of a very biased fbi and cia. When he won the White House, he became the chief law enforcement officer. But he couldn’t control his own government because the holdovers from the Obama administration were actively working to bring him down!

Many of those officials are now out of office. Mr. Trump seems to be wrestling back control of the executive branch. Attorney General Barr is determined to uncover the wrongdoing that took place at those agencies during that tumultuous period between December 2016 and January 2017.

U.S. President Donald Trump and U.S. Attorney General William Barr BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP/Getty Images

“Biblical prophecy indicates that President Trump will actually gain more control of these government agencies that have been working to unseat him.” Gerald Flurry

At his May 1 Senate Judiciary Committee testimony, Mr. Barr said that he suspected most of the overreach carried out by Justice Department officials was done by a few people “in the upper echelons of the Bureau [fbi] and perhaps the Department, but those people are no longer there.”

During the Obama administration, the United States was in the midst of a constitutional crisis. That administration was desperate to hold on to power—even at the expense of the Constitution. They hate that document because it keeps them from getting power.

Then there was a turnaround. Now there’s a man heading the Department of Justice who says he “reveres” the Constitution. It’s sad that it is so rare to hear a man speak like that. Every member of the federal government—and every American citizen—should revere the supreme law of the land. But this nation was desperate for the rule of law to return, even in the Justice Department.

These events are not happening by chance, as my father has pointed out. “Biblical prophecy indicates that there will be something of a turnaround, though, and that President Trump will actually gain more control of these government agencies that have been working to unseat him,” he wrote.

You need to understand what is happening in Washington and why it is happening. These aren’t normal times. Lawlessness in America brought this nation to the brink. Then something held off that destruction. Bible prophecy says America was being “afflicted” (2 Kings 14:26). But God said He would save the nation—temporarily—by the hand of a man like the ancient King Jeroboam ii (verse 27).

The Bible contains a stunning amount of detail about recent events in America’s capital. My father’s article explains those details. America is being saved temporarily. To understand how, why and for how long, please read “Can President Trump Get Control of His Own Divided Government?”