WASHINGTON (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 10th October, 2020) The CIA and FBI will use their bureaucratic talents to slow down declassification of key Russia probe documents that President Donald Trump wants to be released before the November election, former intelligence officials and legal experts told Sputnik.
Director of US National Intelligence John Ratcliffe on Tuesday declassified documents revealing that former CIA Director John Brennan briefed ex-President Obama on Hillary Clinton's plan to tie Trump to Russia in 2016.
Trump this week has called on the Department of Justice to release a report before Election Day, November 3 on the origins of the Russian collusion allegations. The president said on Friday he would be very disappointed if the department failed to produce a report on the issue by then.
Earlier, Axios reported that US Attorney General William Barr told Republican officials that the report would not be released ahead of the November 3 election.
Trump's efforts will likely fail to force the documents into the public domain in time to have any significant impact on the election, retired CIA analyst Ray McGovern, a member of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), said on Friday.
"Trump is challenging the US intelligence establishment head on with less than four weeks to the presidential election but the odds are stacked against him," McGovern said. "Trump has challenged the credibility of the CIA and the FBI but even if he damages their national reputation in the long run, in the run-up to the election he is likely to look impulsive."
Also, both agencies will use their long-horned bureaucratic talents to slow down the declassification of the key documents that the President has demanded until after the election, or so close to it as to minimize their impact, McGovern stressed.
"Top-level executives at the FBI, CIA and Justice Department all backed [Democratic presidential candidate] Hillary Clinton down the line in the fall of 2016, confident that she could not lose. They continue to have a vested interest in ensuring that the whole story does not come out," he said.
Trump was trying to expose a scandal that had generated sustained and outrageous slanders against the Russian government and its alleged interference in domestic US politics, which the Kremlin has always denied, University of Illinois Professor of Law Francis Boyle said.
"This has been shameless Russia bashing that has gone on from the very start of Trump presidency. My reading is that it was a strategy of the Clinton campaign since shortly after Trump won the Republican presidential nomination. [Hillary] Clinton comparing President [Vladimir] Putin to Hitler was just outrageous," he said.
The Democrats in 2016 had wanted to appeal to the US military leadership, to the companies of the military-industrial complex and to the intelligence community, Boyle explained.
"Since then over the entire period of the Trump presidency we have seen continual, uncontrolled Russia bashing on everything," he said.
According to the latest reports, the false accusations against Trump and his campaign alleging fictitious ties to Russia were brought to the attention of then-President Barack Obama by the Director of National Intelligence at the time, John Brennan, Boyle noted.
"So Obama knew full well about the abuses of authority and as the chief law enforcement officer of the US government he had an obligation to stop it but he did not. As a lawyer, a law professor and US citizen I am profoundly concerned," he said.
The revelations about Clinton and her campaign's links to the Russiagate false accusations involving senior FBI and CIA officials had huge potential, but they still needed more evidence, former CIA station chief Philip Giraldi, also a former US Army Intelligence officer and now a member of the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), said.
"Did Obama take the matter farther or did he either sign off on it or ignore it? The potential in this story is huge but the media, of course, has not really pursued it and I think it is too late for it to have any real impact in any event unless something new and supportive surfaces," Giraldi said.
Also, the linking of Trump to Russia by the Clinton campaign was not a decisive factor in Trump's surprise election victory in 2016, even if it was generated by Hillary Clinton, Giraldi recalled.
"The only way this can resonate in the next three weeks to Trump's benefit is if supporting documentation surfaced ...that squarely implicates Hillary - and Obama and [current Democratic presidential candidate Joe] Biden, based on corroborative evidence developed by the FBI and CIA," he said.
Attorney General Barr appointed US Attorney John Durham to investigate the Russiagate allegations that Obama administration officials had weaponized American intelligence in an attempt to defeat Trump's 2016 bid and then undermine his presidency.
