A newly declassified House Intelligence Committee report has unveiled potentially explosive evidence that fundamentally challenges years of assumptions about Russian interference in the 2016 election. The documents reveal that Russian intelligence services possessed damaging information about Hillary Clinton’s health issues, drug usage and political vulnerabilities, but deliberately chose not to release it publicly – suggesting Russia may have actually preferred a Clinton presidency because such compromising material would have given Moscow significant leverage over her administration.
These revelations directly contradict the narrative that has dominated American politics for nearly a decade: that Vladimir Putin actively worked to elect Donald Trump in 2016.
The report, prepared by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence in 2020 and recently declassified by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, indicates that the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service had obtained Democratic National Committee communications detailing what poor health Hillary Clinton was in.
According to the declassified materials, Russian intelligence allegedly possessed emails from DNC officials suggesting that senior Democrat leaders, including President Obama, found Clinton’s health to be “extraordinarily alarming” and believed it could negatively impact her election prospects as of September 2016.
If you remember, in the months before the election, Hillary was rumored to have had a health scare by multiple media outlets. At a 9/11 commemorative event in New York City a video showing Clinton could barely walk and was being held up by multiple members of her staff just before she ducked into a van that took her away.
The documents claim Russian intelligence had emails from high-ranking DNC officials detailing Clinton was experiencing “psycho-emotional problems, uncontrolled fits of anger, aggression and cheerfulness” and was allegedly “placed on a daily regimen of heavy tranquilizers” while remaining “obsessed with a thirst for power.”
The report shows the 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) that concluded Vladimir Putin had developed a “clear preference” for Donald Trump was completely false. The House committee found that this judgment “did not adhere to the tenets of the Intelligence Community Directive analytical standards.” If Putin had wanted Trump to win, he could have easily helped further the narrative that Hillary was too unhealthy to serve by releasing these DNC communications to the public.
According to the declassified report, then-CIA Director John Brennan “ordered the post-election publication of 15 reports containing previously collected but unpublished intelligence, three of which were substandard – containing information that was unclear, of uncertain origin, potentially biased, or implausible.”
The committee noted that two senior CIA officers warned Director Brennan that “we don’t have direct information that Putin wanted to get Trump elected” and that including this information made the agency look politically biased.
Additionally, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Rick Crawford (R-AR) confirmed this was the case while saying it’s even MORE proof that Trump was not being backed by Russia.
“The fact is, there was never an association with Russia” and Donald Trump, Crawford said to Just the News.
“What this document shows is that, if anything, they had a preference for a President Hillary Clinton, because they had information on her that they could exploit after the fact.”
“They were counting on a President Hillary Clinton, and then they would have her over a barrel because of the information that they had on her,” he added.
“What we have in this document basically shows that, because of a DNC hack, they had information about her personally [such as] her mental state, her health conditions and so on…the use of tranquilizers daily, her mood swings, fits of rage…things of this nature,” Crawford said.
Perhaps even more damning is the fact that the documents also reference what has been termed the “Clinton Plan.” The Obama administration had communication from the Clinton’s campaign that they were planning to link Putin and Russian hackers to Trump to “distract the American public” from Clinton’s email server controversy.
This information was reportedly briefed to President Obama by CIA Director Brennan on July 28, 2016, with other senior officials including FBI Director James Comey, Vice President Joe Biden, and Attorney General Loretta Lynch present.
The declassification comes amid ongoing scrutiny of the origins of the Trump-Russia investigation, following Special Counsel John Durham’s findings that the FBI “failed to act” on warnings that it might be the target of efforts to “manipulate or influence the law enforcement process for political purposes.”
Director Gabbard stated during a White House briefing that the intelligence community “mischaracterized intelligence and relied on dubious, substandard sources to create a contrived false narrative” about Putin’s preferences in the 2016 election.
These revelations dispel the established narrative about Russian interference in the 2016 election. While the Mueller investigation found evidence of Russian operations to sow chaos in America before the election, it did not find any evidence whatsoever of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian officials.
The newly declassified materials suggest that Obama’s intelligence agencies may have had access to information that contradicted some of their public assessments about Russian intentions, raising questions about the analytical processes that led to the Intelligence Community Assessment’s conclusions.