Even The Manipulated Senate Intel Report Can’t Hide FBI Spies And Lies

1. After Trump’s surprise election, then-President Obama directed “CIA Director John Brennan to conduct a review of all intelligence relating to Russian involvement in the 2016 election and produce a single comprehensive assessment.” With Brennan at the helm, the Central Intelligence Agency, National Security Agency, and FBI complied a report for Obama, which the FBI insisted include the now-discredited Christopher Steele dossier.
2. That “the FBI didn’t want to stand behind” the Steele dossier raises the question of why then did the FBI insist on including the details in the report, albeit in the annex? Here, it is helpful to remember that the intelligence community briefed then-president Obama on the report on January 5, 2017 and President-elect Trump on the next day—the same day an unclassified version of the ICA was publicly released.
3. Significantly, in tracing this history of the decision to include the Steele dossier in the intel report, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence noted that “the FBI didn’t want to stand behind” Steele's reporting.
4. On April 21, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released a report on its review of the Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) drafted for President Barack Obama on Russia’s interference in the 2016 election.
5. But the FBI did stand behind Steele reporting to federal Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court judges four times: once months earlier, and then mere weeks after the FBI opted to only summarize the dossier in the annex to the ICA report because the agents didn’t “want to stand behind” the reporting.
6. Corporate media immediately touted the Republican-controlled committee’s finding that “the ICA presents a coherent and well-constructed intelligence basis for the case of unprecedented Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election,” including by hacking Democratic National Committee emails, as vindication of the intelligence communities’ handling of all things Russia.

https://thefederalist.com/2020/04/22/even-the-manipulated-senate-intel-report-cant-hide-fbi-spies-and-lies/