Report: House staff concluded Brennan suppressed Russia evidence

A former chief of staff for John Bolton says House staff members determined former CIA Director John Brennan, one of President Trump's harshest critics, "suppressed" intelligence showing Russia wanted Hillary Clinton to win the 2016 election.

"They said that CIA Director Brennan suppressed facts or analysis that showed why it was not in Russia’s interests to support Trump and why Putin stood to benefit from Hillary Clinton’s election. They also told me that Brennan suppressed that intelligence over the objections of CIA analysts," Fred Fleitz wrote in a FoxNews.com commentary.

Fleitz, a former CIA officer and National Security Council chief of staff, was reacting to a report by the Senate Intelligence Committee that defended the 2017 intelligence community assessment on Russian election interference.

The committee concluded with "moderate" to "high" confidence that Russian President Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin sought to boost Donald Trump's 2016 election chances.

But Fred Fleitz said House Intelligence Committee staff members "found the opposite" after "an exhaustive investigation reviewing intelligence and interviewing intelligence officers."

Fleitz said the staff members told him they found that Brennan "suppressed high-quality intelligence suggesting that Putin actually wanted the more predictable and malleable Clinton to win the 2016 election."

"Instead, the Brennan team included low-quality intelligence that failed to meet intelligence community standards to support the political claim that Russian officials wanted Trump to win, House Intelligence Committee staff revealed. They said that CIA analysts also objected to including that flawed, substandard information in the assessment."

The Senate panel report claimed "investigators found no evidence of political pressure to reach a specific conclusion and determined the assessment by the CIA, FBI, and NSA 'presents a coherent and well-constructed intelligence basis for the case of unprecedented Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.'"

When the Senate panel report was released, Brennan took a victory lap, saying, "I'm just very glad that the Senate Intelligence Committee yesterday came out with a report that totally validated the intelligence community’s assessment about Russian interference in the election in 2016 to help Donald Trump."

But the Senate panel conclusion was not the same as that of a House Intelligence Committee report by the Republican majority released in 2018. It found the "majority of the Intelligence Community Assessment judgments on Russia's election activities employed proper analytic tradecraft," but the "judgments on Putin's strategic intentions did not.”

The Washington Examiner reported Democrats on the panel released their own assessment that said they found "no evidence" to cast doubt on the assessment.

Several criminal referrals linked to the Russia investigation were sent to the Justice Department last year.

Fleitz suggested why some of the conclusions might not have aligned.

"Intelligence officers likely told different stories to Republican House Intelligence Committee and bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee investigators because of the strong political bias within intelligence agencies against President Trump," he said.

The origin of the Obama administration's Russia probe is now the subject of a criminal investigation by U.S. Attorney John Durham.

Attorney General William Barr has confirmed that if there's evidence of criminal activity on the part of government officials, they will be charged.

Fleitz pointed out that the House report, claiming Russia meddled to help Trump, was an echo of the discredited Steele dossier that recently was revealed to likely have included Russian disinformation.

He also pointed out "the political establishment and anti-Trump journalists gloated" because the report supported "their biases."

Fleitz chastised congressional Democrats for being "fanatically united in promoting the false Trump-Russia collusion narrative."