With the Florida Airport shooting dominating the headlines, with new, strange information coming out about it with each new revelation, what many people missed was the fact that the Obama administration released the highly awaited declassified intelligence community "assessment" of supposed Russian activities and intentions in the recent U.S. elections, specifically, the general presidential election between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.
Mr. Harwood is a liberal journalist with over 106 thousand followers on Twitter, who tweeted a question to his fans, "Who do you believe America?" offering two choices, Wikileaks or the U.S. Intel Officials. The results didn't turn out as he thought they would, having over 84,000 users participating, which is a larger sample group than almost any traditional polling organization ever uses, and 83 percent of those surveyed said they trusted Wikileaks more than U.S. Intel Officials, and only 17 percent saying they trusted the Intel Officials more.
While the survey is unscientific, where polling organizations deliberately separates out demographics, skewing polls whichever way they want them to go, this was representative of people on one platform, showing a general distrust of our nation's Intelligence agencies that seem to have become so overly politicized in the last decades.
The report that was declassified and released yesterday, is a perfect example of why the public is showing so much distrust and contempt for those agencies.
The entire report is embedded at the end of this article in order for readers to see it for themselves to make their own determinations as to what it does or does not prove, but below is my analysis of specific portions of the report, the things that stuck out the most to me personally.
......This is the declassified version of a longer report that was delivered to President Obama, President-Elect Trump, and indirectly to the Washington Post and other news organs friendly to the Democratic Party. The report constitutes, allegedly, the long-awaited proof that Russia (specifically, Vladimir Putin) meddled in the 2016 presidential election by, most notably, hacking into email accounts of the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton campaign manager John Podesta and distributing emails from those accounts to Wikileaks and others.
Does the report prove that claim? No, it merely states it. There is zero evidence in the report tying the Russian government (or anyone else) to the crude spearfishing effort or to the generic, out-of-date malware that invaded the DNC’s and Podesta’s email systems. Zero. Nada. Zilch.
After seeing the assertion by PowerLine, I clicked the link to the report itself, to read the entire declassified report titled "Background to “Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections”: The Analytic Process and Cyber Incident Attribution," where we see the report uses the terms, quite often in fact, "we access," or "our judgement" to provide their conclusions, but as PowerLine stated, not once in the entire report do they provide any evidence to the American public to justify those "assessments."
They justify the lack of providing any evidence at the very top of the report, in two bullet points:
* The Intelligence Community rarely can publicly reveal the full extent of its knowledge or the precise bases for its assessments, as the release of such information would reveal sensitive sources or methods and imperil the ability to collect critical foreign intelligence in the future.
* Thus, while the conclusions in the report are all reflected in the classified assessment, the declassified report does not and cannot include the full supporting information, including specific intelligence and sources and methods.
In other words, this report that is meant to convince the American public that they can "prove" Russians were ultimately behind truthful information that could have influenced the U.S. election, contains no proof, so you have to trust them that they have the proof, they just cannot reveal it to you!
The report includes an analytic assessment drafted and coordinated among The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and The National Security Agency (NSA), but does not "make an assessment of the impact that Russian activities had on the outcome of the 2016 election," and states clearly that it does not "analyze US political processes or US public opinion."
The portion that caught my attention came under the category of "CIA/FBI/NSA Assessment: Russia’s Influence Campaign Targeting the 2016 US Presidential Election," under the sub category "Russian Campaign Was Multifaceted," which included a bullet point in bold "Russian Propaganda Efforts."
The entire section purports to analyze Russia's intentions in hacking the DNC and the Clinton campaign, but it is noteworthy that not one of the three intelligence agencies have provided the public any proof whatsoever of the the Russians being the ones that provided the leaked emails to Wikileaks, they are simply assuming the general public or anyone reading the report automatically accepts their "assessment" that the "Russians did it."
According to the report, Russian "propaganda" included negative coverage of Hillary Clinton with favorable coverage of Donald Trump, (Note- as did half of American Independent media, those that didn't support Clinton) and below we will break down each of their points of "proof" of Russian propaganda.
First Point, page 13-14 of the PDF, page number 3-4 on the bottom of the report:
Starting in March 2016, Russian Government– linked actors began openly supporting President-elect Trump’s candidacy in media aimed at English-speaking audiences. RT and Sputnik—another government-funded outlet producing pro-Kremlin radio and online content in a variety of languages for international audiences—consistently cast President-elect Trump as the target of unfair coverage from traditional US media outlets that they claimed were subservient to a corrupt political establishment.
Emphasis mine.
MRC, which is a conservative news outlets that carefully monitors liberal bias in the media, conducted a survey of the 12 weeks following the Democratic and Republican conventions, where they analyzed all 588 evening news stories that either discussed or mentioned the presidential campaign on the ABC, CBS and NBC evening newscasts from July 29 through October 20 (including weekends).
They found that "In the twelve weeks since the party conventions concluded in late July, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has received significantly more broadcast network news coverage than his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton, but nearly all of that coverage (91%) has been hostile, according to a new study by the Media Research Center (MRC)."
So the first point in the U.S. Intel report that supposedly shows "Russian Propaganda" is supported by the actual news coverage by American media, meaning the declassified report is stating that reporting the truth is now Russian propaganda."
Second Point, page 14 of the PDF, page number 4 on the bottom of the report:
Russian media hailed President-elect Trump’s victory as a vindication of Putin’s advocacy of global populist movements—the theme of Putin’s annual conference for Western academics in October 2016—and the latest example of Western liberalism’s collapse.
That one very interesting since U.S. media outlets such as the New York Times, consistently agreed that Trump was running a "populist" campaign with headlines like "Like Trump, Europe's Populists Win Big With Rural Voters," and "Will Democracy Survive Trump's Populism?", and "Combative, Populist Steve Bannon Found His Man in Donald Trump," and "With Populist Anger Rising, Italy May Be Next Domino to Fall."
The times also has multiple articles about the "Death of liberalism," and "The end of Identity Liberalism,"... etc, etc... and did the Washington Post with "When Liberalism's Moment Ended."
(All those headlines can be searched using any search engine, we did not link to those outlets)
Almost all the American mainstream media basically reported the same exact thing that this so-called "Intelligence" report claims is Russian propaganda, so are they also going to claim the MSM is spreading Russian propaganda. If that is the basis for Obama's Russian sanctions, then why has he not sanctioned the liberal media in the U.S. for "interference" and influencing the U.S. election?
Detractors will claim that the sanctions stemmed from the leaked emails to Wikileaks, that came from "Russia," but not one can provide any proof that Russia was behind those hacks, and it has already been verified that the emails were all real, no alterations to them, so whoever was behind the hacks, whether it was Russia or not, all they did was expose the DNC and the Clinton campaign for their utter corruption as well as collusion between the Clinton campaign and the MSM.
Third Point, page 14 of the PDF, page number 4 on the bottom of the report:
Pro-Kremlin proxy Vladimir Zhirinovskiy, leader of the nationalist Liberal Democratic Party of Russia, proclaimed just before the election that if President-elect Trump won, Russia would “drink champagne” in anticipation of being able to advance its positions on Syria and Ukraine.
Errrrrrrr....... half of America was saying they would pop the cork on the champagne if Trump beat Hillary, but given the history between Clinton and Russia after the big "reset," frankly that isn't a surprise and how on earth is that propaganda, Russian or otherwise?
Before their Fourth Point, Page 14 of the PDF, page number 4 on the bottom of the report, it gives a brief header which states "RT’s coverage of Secretary Clinton throughout the US presidential campaign was consistently negative and focused on her leaked e-mails and accused her of corruption, poor physical and mental health, and ties to Islamic extremism. Some Russian officials echoed Russian lines for the influence campaign that Secretary Clinton’s election could lead to a war between the United States and Russia.
Before highlighting the actual point made after that header... a show of hands on those that think the corruption of Clinton should have been a focus in a campaign where a women that ran the state department during Benghazi and the rise of ISIS, as well as showed signs of some very strange behavior as well as passing out publicly on 9/11, was running for the position of President of the United States of America?
The question isn't why Russia was reporting on these issues, the question is why did the mainstream media in America downplayed all those relevant issues, while providing 91 percent negative and hostile coverage against Donald Trump!
I am going to deal with just one more of their points listed under the Russian Propaganda category from the declassified report, Page 14 of the PDF, page number 4 on the bottom of the report, because frankly each one of them seem, in my opinion, more ridiculous than the one prior.
I helpfully added hyperlinks into the text above to each video they mentioned since they neglected to do so.
This ladies and gentlemen is why I say this report actually vindicates Russia rather than proves anything against them, as it shows they were entirely truthful in their "reporting," because it has become a sad state of affairs indeed, when it is foreign media, from the Daily Mail or RT or reports from any other country, that gives the most information Americans obviously want to know about, while the American press is too busy trying to figure out how to "spin" it according to their bias before doing their jobs and informing the American public.
BOTTOM LINE
This report which tells us they won't provide any "proof" to back up their assessments, purports to tell us how Russian propaganda (which turned out to be the truth) was deliberately spread to the American people, which ironically enough, ends up being an Obama propaganda report trying to influence Americans into thinking that telling Americans the truth is actually a bad thing, and how dare Russia do so!
Just one question for the Obama administration and the Intelligence community.... Where is the proof we have all been waiting to see?
I am personally astounded at how unintelligent our so-called "Intelligence" agencies think the American people are.
The entire declassified report shown below the video. Readers are encouraged to go through the entire report, see if they agree with my analysis or if they see more to it, and to highlight anything that stands out to them from within the report in the comment section below.
Before reading the report, a reminder that yesterday Congress also certified the results of Donald Trump's electoral votes, to which Democratic House members tried to protest on the floor, where VP Joe Biden was consistently forced to shut them down and up, finally saying "It's Over." Their antics can be seen below as snowflake Democratic Representatives attempt one last time to stop Donald Trump for being declared the next President of the United States of America:
