Rep. Rick Crawford joined the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) in early 2017, just as the Obama administration was putting the Russia collusion hoax into motion. The Arkansas Republican and his fellow committee members would soon be up to their necks in one of the darkest chapters in U.S. intelligence history.
On Jan. 6, 2017, documents suggest, the deep state was setting up its own brand of insurrection, pushing an Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) filled with dubious information and sourcing that Crawford believes was designed to topple President-elect Donald Trump’s first term in office.
“Forgive me for being coarse, but these [intelligence] analysts, for lack of a better term, crapped all over ICD [Intelligence Community Directive] 203. They did not follow it in the slightest,” Crawford said on the latest episode of The Federalist Radio Hour. He was referring to the analytic standards that CIA agents and analysts must follow. They didn’t.
“It was ignored and they went forward with their own narrative that was done simply to discredit President Trump and to spin a narrative that was false: That he was involved with [Russian President] Vladimir Putin in helping to change the outcome of the election,” he added.
‘It Didn’t Matter If It Was True’
Crawford, who in January took over as chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, has, like his Republican colleagues, been waiting a long time for the public to know what he has known for years. The recent declassification and release of the committee’s 2020 majority staff report lays to waste the lie that the Trump campaign colluded with the Kremlin to steal the 2016 election and exposes the likes of then-CIA Director John Brennan for driving a deeply flawed intelligence assessment.
The report, released last week by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, found that one “scant, unclear, and unverifiable fragment of a sentence from one of the substandard reports constitutes the only classified information cited to suggest Putin ‘aspired’ to help Trump win.”
The ICA “ignored strong indicators supporting the alternative hypothesis that, at a minimum, Putin didn’t care who won and even had reasons to prefer a Clinton victory,” and that by “adopting a single-track explanation for Putin’s actions — that he ‘preferred’ candidate Trump and ‘aspired’ to help him win — the ICA authors had little choice but to ignore contrary evidence and attempt to force-fit weak evidence to make their case.”
And there was a plethora of contrary evidence. Career intelligence officials warned Brennan and then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper that they were barking up the wrong tree. The Trump-hating deep staters didn’t listen.
Forcing their collusion narrative, Brennan and crew relied on the Steele dossier to the disgust of intelligence analysts who saw it for the garbage political opposition research that it was. According to the committee report, a CIA analyst told investigators that Brennan “refused to remove it, and when confronted with the dossier’s main flaws, [Brennan] responded, ‘Yes, but doesn’t it ring true?’”
Crawford found the old CIA director’s comment particularly troubling.
“It didn’t matter if it was true, as far as he was concerned. It rang true so it was going to be central to their assessment,” the committee chairman said. “The analytic integrity was completely lacking.”
Never mind that Hillary Clinton’s campaign paid for the Steele dossier, littered with salacious and unverifiable opposition research.
‘Willing Accomplices’
Crawford said there’s a reason why the damning documents have been sealed for so long. Former Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., who chaired the Intelligence Committee in the thick of the Russia collusion hoax and who was viciously attacked by Democrats and the media for combatting the lies, tried unsuccessfully to get the 2020 report released. Rep. Mike Turner, an Ohio Republican who served as chairman of the Intelligence Committee in the previous session of Congress, tried as well but ran into a brick wall, Crawford said. That changed with Trump’s return to the White House in January. The administration returned the documents to the House Intelligence Committee, and they are now open to public inspection.
“So what we see here is a fraud, a hoax perpetrated on the American people at the expense of President Trump,” the congressman said. “And this was nothing more than a Psyop, a psychological operation against the American people, really under the direction of President Obama and conducted by the IC leadership team.”
And the hoax was greatly assisted by a Trump-hating corporate media that gladly gobbled up all of the false “tips” the Intelligence Community and like-minded political operatives fed them, Crawford said.
“It’s not as though the media were just reporting facts that were being put out there in the public sphere. They were willing accomplices,” the chairman said. So much so, he added, that the Steele dossier was leaked to Yahoo News, and the leak was used as a predicate to go after Trump and launch the FBI’s politically-driven Crossfire Hurricane sham probe. Ex-FBI agent Peter Strzok, the partisan player behind the investigation, suggested as much in a Sept. 23, 2016 text, boasting that the Steele dossier was able to “influence” media.
“Looking at the Yahoo article, I would definitely say at a minimum Steele’s reports should be viewed as intended to influence as well as to inform,” the disgraced former agent, fired from the FBI in August 2018, wrote in the declassified communications.
Now that same accomplice media is ignoring or dismissing the bombshell documents.
“So the media essentially becomes not an unwitting player in this whole thing but a witting accomplice, like, ‘Yes, give us this information. We’ll help spin this. We’ll help sell it to the American people, we’ll help take down President Trump,’” Crawford said. “And they’re not about to admit that they made that mistake or that they were involved in that because that would be a huge revelation. It would discredit them all.”
‘An Absolute Travesty’
Like corporate media, the Intelligence Community has had plenty of struggles with the truth over the years. Crawford and the Subcommittee on Central Intelligence Agency have investigated more recent suspect ICAs.
“The Intelligence Community (IC) has attempted to thwart the Subcommittee’s investigative efforts to uncover the truth at every turn. Despite this, the Subcommittee has uncovered information illustrative of problems with the ICA’s creation, review, and release,” Crawford wrote in the subcommittee’s interim report in December on “the Intelligence Community’s Conclusions on Anomalous Health Incidents.” The report asked, “Is the Intelligence Community Hiding the Real Reason for This Phenomenon?”
Crawford said he wants to believe that the perpetrators of the Russia collusion hoax will ultimately be held accountable, but he worries about legal “loopholes.” The major players have gone on to very lucrative post-IC careers, serving as “credible experts” to the same news outlets that ran with their twisted intelligence.
“That’s an absolute travesty because what they have done, they really, in my opinion, perpetrated the largest, deepest, widest hoax we’ve ever seen in American history and they seem to be proud of it. And that’s the thing that bothers me the most.”
Listen to The Federalist Radio Hour podcast interview with Rep. Rick Crawford here.
Matt Kittle is a senior elections correspondent for The Federalist. An award-winning investigative reporter and 30-year veteran of print, broadcast, and online journalism, Kittle previously served as the executive director of Empower Wisconsin.
