Gabbard: Obama Ordered January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment To Be Produced

DEVINE: “Just as an overview, what — in total, what have you discovered that we didn’t know before?”
GABBARD: “What really started this string of declassifications and releases of documents coming from different agencies, the most recent one as of this recording at least coming from Senate Judiciary Chairman Grassley with the declassified Durham annex, what really kicked this all off was a result of months of work by a team that I have selected within my office with intelligence professionals coming from the CIA, the FBI, the DIA, the NSA, from different elements within the intelligence community really tasked with a very simple mission, finding the truth.”
DEVINE: “About the Russia hoax?”
GABBARD: “Finding the truth in this case about — focused on election integrity and specifically around this whole Russia hoax narrative that really consumed much of the 2016 campaign and certainly pretty much all four years of President Trump’s first administration. And for months they sought to find and dig up documents, emails, previous intelligence assessments, checking the sources that were listed in those assessments that really led to the first big release that we had that uncovered the truth about how President Obama ordered this January 2017 intelligence community assessment to be produced. He directed this order in early December after President Trump had won the election.”
DEVINE: “In an Oval Office meeting, December 9, 2016.”
GABBARD: “Exactly. And the language that was used in providing those tasks to the intelligence community from then Obama’s DNI, James Clapper, is very significant, because it doesn’t ask the question, did Russia try to help Trump win this election? It was detail how Moscow tried to influence the election in favor of Donald Trump. So it presumes the conclusion and drives the conclusion that President Obama wanted to see. And that really kicked off what James Clapper, John Brennan, James Comey, and others fulfilled in this directive, in pulling together pieces of intelligence that based on the tradecraft standards that exist across the intelligence community were considered substandard at best and were never used in a previous assessment because they were essentially trash. They were not credible. And then of course, using the Steele Dossier as one of the sources as though it was credible, even though the FBI and those involved, John Brennan and James Clapper also knew that this was a long discredited document. They knew it was politically motivated, manufactured pieces of paper that were not rooted in any kind of true intelligence or truth.”
DEVINE: “And it turned out really to be sort of bar gossip, wasn’t it?”
GABBARD: “Yes.”
DEVINE: “People that were making up stories about Donald Trump that were so fanciful.”
GABBARD: “That’s right.”