13 posts from Wednesday, July 23, 2025

Whether we like it or not, we're suddenly engaged in a fast-paced competition to build and define this groundbreaking technology that will determine so much about the future of civilization itself because of the genius and creativity of Silicon Valley. And it is incredible, incredible genius. Without question the most brilliant place anywhere on Earth, America is the country that started the AI race. And as President of the United States, I'm here today to declare that America is going to win it. We're going to work hard, we're going to win it. Because we will not allow any foreign nation to beat us. Our children will not live in a plan of control by the algorithms.

Transcribed automatically. Expect errors in names and numbers.

I'm going to go over the key findings from the House Intelligence Report, which investigated the claims that were made by an intelligence community assessment ordered by President Obama and published in January of 2017. First, Putin's principal interests relating to the 2016 election were to undermine faith in the U.S. democratic process, not show any preference of a certain candidate. In fact, this report shows Putin held back from leaking compromising material on Hillary Clinton prior to the election, instead planning to release it after the election to weaken what Moscow viewed as an inevitable Clinton presidency. In the January 2017 intelligence community assessment that President Obama ordered, John Brennan, who was CIA director at the time, and the intelligence community intentionally suppressed intelligence that showed Putin was saving the most damaging material that he had in his possession about Hillary Clinton until after her potential and likely victory. The report goes into great detail about the information that Russia and Putin had on Hillary Clinton, which included possible criminal acts like secret meetings with multiple named U.S. religious organizations in which State Department officials offered, in exchange for supporting Secretary Clinton's campaign for the presidency, significant increases in financing from the State Department. They also had documents that showed the patronage of the State Department to State Department employees who would go and support Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign. There were high-level DNC emails that detailed evidence of Hillary's "psycho-emotional problems, uncontrolled fits of anger, aggression, and cheerfulness," and that then Secretary Clinton was allegedly on a daily regimen of heavy tranquilizers. Then CIA Director Brennan and the intelligence community mischaracterized intelligence and relied on dubious substandard sources to create a contrived false narrative that Putin developed a "clear preference" for Trump. Brennan and the IC misled lawmakers by referencing the debunked Steele dossier to assess "Russia's plans and intentions," falsely suggesting that this dossier had intelligence value when he knew that it was discredited. The intelligence community excluded significant intelligence and ignored or selectively quoted reliable intelligence that contradicted the intelligence community assessment's key findings on Putin's alleged support for Trump, including this intelligence reporting would have exposed the ICA's claim as implausible, if not ridiculous. The intelligence community assessment omitted reliably sourced information such as how some Russian intelligence officials were "planning for candidate Hillary Clinton's victory," while others assessed neither Trump nor Clinton would respect Russia's interests. As was reflected in the ODNI documents that we released on Friday, multiple intelligence community assessments released in the months leading up to the November 2016 election concluded that Russia had neither the intent nor capability to impact the outcome of the U.S. election. On December 5th of 2016, the FBI and ODNI gave the House Intelligence Committee its first post-election classified briefing, in which there was no mention of Putin aspiring to elect Trump by either agency. The presidential daily brief, drafted on December 8th of 2016, stated that no Russian or criminal actors impacted vote counts. This document was pulled just hours before it was to be published due to "new guidance." If it had been published, it would have been briefed to both President Obama and President-elect Donald Trump. On December 9th, 2016, a National Security Council meeting was called to gather President Obama's senior national security officials, which included CIA Director Brennan, then Obama, DNI James Clapper, Susan Rice, and others. Following that secret meeting, DNI Clapper's assistant sent an email to the intelligence community with the subject line "POTUS Tasking on Russia Election Meddling," tasking ODNI leaders to create a new assessment per the President's request. The House Intelligence Committee oversight report that we released today reveals that "unlike routine intelligence community analysis, the intelligence community assessment was a high-profile product ordered by the President," President Obama. It directed senior intelligence community agency heads and created an intelligence community assessment limited to just five analysts, using one principal drafter. This is not something that occurs in the normal path of producing an intelligence community assessment that reflects the views across the intelligence community. The production of this intelligence community assessment was subject to unusual directives directly from the President and senior political appointees, especially the former director of the CIA, John Brennan. The House Intelligence Committee oversight report also shows how later that same day, on December 9, Brennan ordered the publication of "substandard reporting on Russian activities," which had previously been withheld from publication of prior assessments because the information was judged "to have not met long-standing publication standards." Some of the information later used in the Obama-ordered assessment over the objections of veteran CIA officers was "unclear or from unknown sources." The Intelligence Committee's oversight report reveals that CIA Director Brennan overruled senior CIA officers who challenged the Obama-ordered intelligence assessment, stating, "We don't have direct information that Putin wanted to get Trump elected." Yet the Obama-directed assessment was published on January 6, 2017, which explicitly stated, "We 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." The CIA and FBI, then led by John Brennan and James Comey, expressed high confidence in this judgment, while the NSA expressed moderate confidence. Yet as the report we release today shows, the ICA, the Intelligence Community Assessment, did not cite any report where Putin indicated helping Trump win was an objective. The opposite is true. With regards to the Steele dossier, we now know that one of the source documents that the Obama administration used in the creation of this intelligence assessment in January of 2017 was none other than the discredited, unverified Steele dossier. The House Intel report states, "Contradicting public claims by then CIA Director Brennan that the dossier was not in any way incorporated into this intelligence assessment, the dossier was referenced in the intelligence assessment's main body text and further detailed in a two-page assessment annex." John Brennan lied, and he denied using this dossier in this intelligence assessment that President Obama ordered because he knew it was discredited, it was a politically-motivated manufactured document. He directed senior CIA officials to use it anyway. CIA officer told the House Intelligence Committee staff as they investigated this, "The director of the CIA, John Brennan, refused to remove it, and when confronted with the dossier's many flaws, responded, 'Yes, but doesn't it ring true?'" Even the bipartisan Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report published in 2020 criticized the FBI's handling of the Steele dossier, noting its "completely unverified nature and purposeful sidestepping of intelligence community procedures in its use." President Obama, Hillary Clinton, John Brennan, James Clapper, James Comey, and others, including their mouthpieces in the media, knowingly lied as they repeated the contrived narrative that was created in this January 2017 intelligence community assessment with high confidence as though it were fact. John Brennan, as CIA director, stated in a memo to his agency staff in December of 2016, saying, "There is strong consensus among us on the scope, nature, and intent of Russian interference in our presidential election." This was reported by NBC News, confirming that Brennan, along with James Clapper and James Comey, agreed with the CIA's assessment that Russia intervened to help Trump win the presidency. As Obama's director of national intelligence, James Clapper was tasked with overseeing the creation of this assessment in January of 2017 by President Obama, and he expressed confidence in its findings. In a 2018 interview with the Harvard Gazette, he talked about how he provided Trump with the same classified assessment that President Obama received, which included the high-confidence judgment that Putin directly ordered the hacking and election interference. Clapper then went on to add, "I think they, the Russians, actually influenced the outcome." This is a brief summary of the details that you'll find within the House Majority Staff's report in their investigation into the Obama-directed January 2017 intelligence community assessment that leads us to the very same conclusion that we announced in the release of our documents on Friday. The implications of this are far-reaching and have to do with the integrity of our democratic republic. It has to do with an outgoing president taking action to manufacture intelligence, to undermine and usurp the will of the American people in that election, and launch what would be a years-long coup against the incoming President of the United States, Donald Trump.

Transcribed automatically. Expect errors in names and numbers.