The American people still don’t know some of the most significant details of Russia’s intervention in the 2016 election. Four years after the fact, the story is still redacted.
The Washington Examiner extracted that revelation from the latest Senate Intelligence Committee report on Russian intervention in U.S. elections.
“The administration was not fully engaged until some key intelligence insights were provided by the intelligence community, which shifted how the administration viewed the issue,” the Senate report concluded, noting that Obama officials then guarded that secretive late July or early August intelligence as closely as the preparations for the raid on Osama bin Laden.
The Examiner is generally pro-Trump but this report is not slanted.
The specific information that jolted the Obama administration into action is hidden within a blacked-out section titled “[Redacted] Intelligence Was The ‘Wake Up’ Call.” The information appears to have been revealed to Obama officials by Brennan, based on a nonredacted footnote citing his June 2017 Senate testimony and on paragraphs noting that the information was “briefed by Director Brennan.”
Exactly what Obama national security adviser Susan Rice recalled from that briefing is redacted, but the report states that, “within an hour or two of learning of the information, Ambassador Rice advocated for the material to be briefed to President Obama.”
So the “wake-up call” seems to have been the predicate to the CIA-NSA-FBI finding of January 2017 that Russia had interfered in the election. That finding enraged Trump who fired FBI director James Comey. That led to led the appointment of a special prosecutor Robert Mueller and his two tw year investigation, which lead to House impeachment of the President and Senate acquittal.
Yet we still don’t know the information that started these falling dominos. One report holds that the CIA obtained intelligence indicated the Russian President Vladimir Putin was knowledgable about the Russian hacking, something that has never been confirmed.
I’m not suggestion there wasn’t a good reason for the investigation of Trump, only that the official secrecy makes it difficult for the voting public to understand the issue. Secrecy makes people cynical.
You can read the Senate Intelligence Committee report here.
Source: ‘Wake-up call’: Secretive CIA report to Obama revealed 2016 Russia hacks
