Tuesday on the RCP Podcast, RealClearInvestigations reporter Aaron Mate spoke to Carl Cannon about his recent article dissecting Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard’s new report on Russiagate. Mate’s report: “Russiagate’s Architects Suppressed Doubts to Peddle False Claims” “Trump calls it a hoax, and I think that’s an accurate statement now-absolutely,” he said. “Nobody defends the notion anymore that there was some sort of high-level conspiracy between Trump’s campaign and Russia, which was the basis for the FBI’s investigation and the Mueller probe.” “What we’re reporting now is new documents showing that, yeah, in September 2016, as the Russian interference allegations were heating up, the FBI and the NSA broke from their counterparts in CIA and said: we have low confidence that Russia hacked the DNC and then released that material through online personas as well as WikiLeaks.” “That’s the allegation that’s at the heart of Russian interference claims. And what we’re saying is-we’re only learning now, more than eight years later-that the FBI and the NSA had low confidence in that assertion,” he said. “So how did WikiLeaks get this information? If Russia didn’t give it to them, who did?” Cannon asked. “That’s the question,” Mate said. “And I think we’ve been prevented from getting a real answer because there was a narrative decided upon very early to blame Russia, even though the evidence for it wasn’t there.” “So we have the suppression of this low-confidence assessment from the FBI and the NSA in September. Then, a few weeks later, the Obama administration still puts out, on October 7, a statement saying that the U.S. intelligence community is confident that Russia was behind the hack and release of the Democratic Party emails.” “Now, it’s notable that if you look at that statement, the NSA and the FBI are not on it. It’s the Department of Homeland Security, which was run by Jeh Johnson at the time, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which was run by James Clapper.” “And so they put out a statement that contradicted what the FBI and the NSA were saying privately,” he continued. “And on December 9, you have a high-level meeting at the White House convened by Obama with all his top national security principals, including Brennan and Clapper. And funnily enough, the FBI and the NSA are invited, but they’re not represented by their leaders-James Comey and Mike Rogers.” “At that meeting, according to notes newly declassified by Tulsi Gabbard, they decide: Okay, we’re going to put out a new report making a public attribution to Russia.” “So this is where my speculation comes in,” he said. “I think at that point (this is after Trump has won, the controversy around Russia is swirling), there’s an effort to taint Trump with Russia. It really ramps up after he wins. I think at that point, it was decided: We’re going to blame Russia. And somehow the dissent from the FBI and NSA was overcome.” “Because a month later, when a new intelligence assessment was put out to the public with the FBI and the NSA involved, now all of a sudden, that low confidence had changed to high confidence. But we have no way of knowing what changed in the FBI and the NSA… They’ve never explained that.” “There was a convergence of interests in blaming Russia for Trump, rather than looking at other reasons,” he added. “It starts, as you say, with the Democratic Party. Hillary Clinton’s campaign. They felt it was their turn. That was the slogan-it’s her turn, right? That this presidency was theirs. It was taken from them. And they certainly had contempt for Trump voters. Hillary Clinton, after all, dismissed people as deplorables.” “And we know-according to the book Shattered, which was an insider account of the Clinton campaign-that immediately they decided to blame Russia, rather than looking at Hillary Clinton’s own record.” “There was no skepticism at all, especially on what was a conspiracy theory: that Trump and Russia were in cahoots, Trump was being blackmailed,” Mate said. “At least with Saddam Hussein and Iraq WMDs, I can understand why someone might buy into that because Saddam Hussein was a pretty bad person, okay? But this was a conspiracy theory, and the most mainstream conspiracy theory that I’ve ever seen, and there was no skepticism whatsoever.”
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