Frail CIA Director John Brennan briefed extinct President Obama on Hillary Clinton’s “belief” to tie the Trump advertising and marketing campaign to Russia as a formulation of distracting the general public from her non-public electronic mail server scandal sooner than the 2016 election, consistent with newly declassified documents.
Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe on Tuesday declassified Brennan’s handwritten notes alongside with a CIA memo exhibiting that officers referred the alleged intention to the FBI for doable investigation.
“Nowadays, at the route of President Trump, I declassified extra documents connected to ongoing Congressional oversight and investigative activities,” Ratcliffe mentioned in a commentary.
Brennan’s notes, which have been taken after he briefed Obama on the intelligence, cite “a proposal from one in every of her foreign coverage advisers to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by the Russian security provider,” which was “alleged licensed by Hillary Clinton.”
The heavily-redacted CIA memo references “an replace discussing U.S. presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s approval of a belief concerning U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump and Russian hackers hampering U.S. elections as a formulation of distracting the general public from her employ of a non-public electronic mail server.”
In 2016, the Clinton advertising and marketing campaign and the Democratic National Committee diminished in dimension Fusion GPS and extinct British intelligence officer Christopher Steele to compile the controversial Russian file, which supposed to design a connection between the Trump advertising and marketing campaign and Russia and contained salacious allegations about Trump, then the Republican nominee.
The file was later primitive in functions to surveil Trump partner Carter Page. The Justice Department’s inspector identical old has since concluded that the FBI did now not expose the International Intelligence Surveillance Court docket that the file was unreliable.
“The next records is equipped for the habitual employ of your bureau for background investigative circulate or lead functions as relevant,” states the CIA memo, which was sent to then-FBI Director James Comey and Peter Strzok, then the deputy assistant director of counterintelligence.
Closing week, Comey told the Senate Judiciary Committee that he did now not be aware whether he got an investigative referral on Clinton in September 2016.
“That doesn’t ring any bells with me,” Comey mentioned.
“That’s a magnificent beautiful thing that it doesn’t ring a bell,” Republican Chairman Lindsey Graham responded. “You bag this inquiry from the intelligence community to opinion at the Clinton advertising and marketing campaign making an try to make a distraction, accusing Trump of being a Russian agent or a Russian stooge.”
The newly declassified documents have been forwarded to the House and Senate Intelligence Committees by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
