DNI Gabbard dropped this unbelievable and yet true bombshell Friday morning, releasing 114 pages of declassified documents from the Intelligence Community proving the existence of manufactured and politicized intelligence on the Russia Hoax in 2016. There are so many harmful consequences from this behavior by top leaders in our government who attempted to undermine President Trump’s lawful election by the people of the United States of America.
DNI Gabbard covered the main ones, saying it better than I believe anyone else could, as she laid out the facts of the discovery in her Press Release. She addressed the critical issues saying, “This was politicized intelligence that was used as the basis for countless smears seeking to delegitimize President Trump’s victory, the years-long Mueller investigation, two Congressional impeachments, high level officials being investigated, arrested, and thrown in jail, heightened US-Russia tensions and more.”
She also addressed the effect this hoax had on the American people, saying, “Their egregious abuse of power and blatant rejection of our Constitution threatens the very foundation and integrity of our democratic republic. No matter how powerful, every person involved in this conspiracy must be investigated and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, to ensure nothing like this ever happens again. The American people’s faith and trust in our democratic republic and therefore the future of our nation depends on it.”
These powerful statements illustrate that this Hoax shook the foundations of our democracy to its core, and her statement that this should never be allowed to happen again is the most important takeaway. But I would additionally like to focus on another aspect that this scandal touches, and that is the weaponization of the Intelligence Community against the American people. These reports show collusion between DHS, FBI, CIA, NSA, and the White House, all in the service of influencing the American people to push a false narrative.
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This is a complicated issue, so let’s start at the beginning. After 9/11, there was a push among the government and specifically among the Intelligence Community to promote more interagency cooperation and prevent different agencies from working in silos, as that is part of what the government believed led to the surprise element of the attack on 9/11. The government found that different agencies had pieces of information and were worried about a potential attack, but no one agency had enough information to predict the specifics of the attack. The government decided that they may have been able to predict the attack better if they weren’t working in silos. This was a good and significant change that needed to be implemented.
The CIA and other agencies that deal with foreign intelligence have historically been subject to strict rules that forbid them from operating on or spying on American citizens on American soil in most circumstances. However, after 9/11, the American people’s privacy and protections as citizens were stripped back to supposedly combat future terrorist attacks. DHS was created, and the NSA was empowered. The NSA has since developed a track record for taking liberties with their jurisdiction and spying on American citizens. Then we had rapid advancements in technology that brought Americans' personal lives online and into spaces that had no legal precedent for privacy. Fast forward to 2016, when this Russia Hoax begins taking place, and DHS, CIA, FBI, NSA, and others were directed by the White House to work together to manufacture intelligence to subvert the will of the American people. With this kind of pressure and direction from the White House, there are numerous ways that protections enshrined for American citizens could have been violated. When different agencies with varying jurisdictions and mandates are directed to work together against the American people, how can we ensure that our protections are being respected? DHS has access to information that the CIA might not, and vice versa, because they have different mandates. This, in theory, protects Americans from the type of influence coming from the Intelligence Community that was peddled during this hoax. This hoax was luckily contained to manufacturing and politicizing intelligence, as far as we know. Still, the demand from the White House for cooperation among all these agencies to work against the American people should be enough to prompt us to pause and think seriously.
As much as we need cooperation and we want our homeland protection agencies to have the best information possible, I believe this revelation is a powerful reason for us to implement checks and balances on the Intelligence Community. We should do better at specifying in which cases it is acceptable for agencies to cooperate and share sensitive data of American citizens. While this was hopefully an isolated incident and the perpetrators will be prosecuted, it highlights the need to revisit procedures within the Intelligence Community. We have seen how powerful the Intelligence Community has become when they are directed to cooperate and how that power can be weaponized against the American people if the wrong leaders are in charge. We rushed forward after 9/11 to introduce cooperation to improve national security; now it is time to refine that cooperation with checks and balances.
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