Those Pesky IC Reports

Opinion by George McClellan:

The media, including fair and balanced Fox news, has bought into the Left’s narrative that Russia gave the election to Donald Trump by ‘hacking’ the DNC, revealing the DNC’s secrets thus costing Hillary Clinton the Presidency. The IC Reports said so! The biggest secret the DNC had to hide was its own incompetence protected as it was, by a body guard of arrogance, lies, campaign failures and deceit.

The Sunday Talk shows do not help in seeking the truth. The media is in the business of collecting ad revenues with “gotcha” points and firsts. It’s a sad business. The direction of Chris Wallace, on today’s Fox News Sunday (01/08/17), the first talk show of the day, is to insist that the interviewee, in this case Reince Priebus, admit that Trump does accept the Intelligence Communities Report or, if not, agrees that the Intelligence community’s report, that Russia indexed hacked the election, was accurate and accepted by all the IC agencies. The premise here is how can Trump, a totally non-political person, even doubt the product of the Intelligence community?  Priebus, to his credit did not permit himself to be ensnared by Wallace’s carefully crafted talking point questions and presented counter-points generally ignored by the main stream media and certainly ignored by Chris Wallace in rebuttal.

On Meet the Press, hosted by Chuck Todd, quite the opposite is true. Todd interviewed Democrats and acolytes from their leftist pool of media propagandists, who are already prepared to support the Left’s narrative that Trumps election must be invalid because those nasty Russians hacked the election.

The line of questions from the interviewers I watched, totally ignore the real crime that was revealed, the mishandling of US Classified documents on Hillary Clinton’s private servers and their subsequent exposure to Russian hacking by John Podesta’s laziness. The whole issue is driven by Hillary losing the election to a neanderthal and Obama’s late realization that his legacy is in danger. Time’s running out.

Nowhere on today’s shows, did I hear any comment about the interview of Representative Pete Hoekstra by Fox’s Megan Kelly the night before. Hoekstra, former House Intelligence Committee Chairman, shocked Kelly with his comments. Hoekstra, basically conducted his own forensic examination of the unclassified IC reports and found them wanting, opening the question of their authenticity.

He said the declassified report only represented the views of three intelligence agencies, not the claimed  seventeen. He also questioned why the DHS and the DIA were not co-authors of that report; why they did not have input, or why it lacked dissenting views, a normal procedure on high level reports of fungible data. Those are very important questions and they’re not being asked nor answered.

The declassified report, issued on 6 January, was an abridged version of a previous longer report ordered by Obama to conclude that Vladimir Putin did indeed order a hacking campaign to damage Hillary’s candidacy and promote Trump’s. Whoever the IC functionaries were who wrote the report, they expressed ‘high confidence’ in their conclusions but offered no evidence to support them. Evidence is hidden behind “protecting confidential sources and methods,” a trick used to avoid exposing real important information or worse, exposing the political plot to undermine Donald Trump. The timing of the disclosure, the clumsiness of its preparation, was clearly an attempt to provide Obama with an alleged intelligence report on Russian interference in our election that Obama could release prior to his leaving office. The goal, is to undermine the legitimacy of Trump’s election, pure and simple.

I couldn’t be less concerned were I reviewing an intelligence report or evidence of a murder, but all data, all information relevant to the issue must be supported by provable or substantiated evidence of its truth. In this case, lacking that, all we can conclude is the scheme is another pitiful, clumsy attempt by Obama, to maintain the illusion that his legacy matters, and will show him to be one of America’s great presidents.

If I were a conspiratorial type, I might think that IC agency insiders produced that sloppy report on purpose. I believe there are career employee’s in those agencies now willing to sabotage Obama’s legacy. Remember, freedom is the goal, the Constitution is the way. Now, go get ‘em! (08Jan17),