Three years ago, on February 25th, 2021, Aaron Maté at RealClearInvestigations ran "In Final Days, Trump Gave Up on Forcing Release of Russiagate Files, Nunes Prober Says." Extensively quoting former Principal Deputy to the Acting Director of National Intelligence Kash Patel, Aaron wrote a section on "Assessing the 'Intelligence Community Assessment,'" detailing a lot of the same story Michael Shellenberger, Alexandra Gutentag and I ran in Public and Racket Thursday.
Many of us who followed this story - a number of reporters on both sides of the aisle did so obsessively - have long had a good idea about the general direction of that House investigation.
An attentive reader will notice nearly everyone on the list has been denounced at some point by the mainstream commentators who got this story horribly wrong.
Anyone can go back and read the reports of the figures listed above and piece together pretty much the whole story we ran this week, minus a few conspicuous details.
These details, along with things like the assertion that the surveillance had "Nothing to do with our relationship with Russia" and was "Just leveraging capabilities to undermine a rookie unprepared Trump campaign," are important and move the story forward.
Far from searching for credit, the goal in jumping on TV shows and podcasts and trying to make noise with these stories is to inspire or shame other reporters to build on these articles, as we built on eight years of past reports.
Brennan already co-signed that story in May of 2017, when he testified in Congress, saying he had been "Aware of intelligence and information about contacts between Russian officials and U.S. persons that raised concerns" that those people "Were cooperating with the Russians," and that this "Served as the basis for the FBI investigation to determine whether such collusion occurred." The Guardian's "British Spies Were First to Spot Trump Team's Links With Russia" also told this same basic story.
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