Thread by @shellenberger

The newly declassified appendix to the Durham report is game-changing. It showed that the CIA believed Russian intelligence memos, which analyzed hacked emails and alleged a Clinton Plan to vilify Trump by linking him to Russia, were credible.

"The CIA prepared a written assessment of the authenticity and veracity of the above-mentioned intelligence. The CIA stated that it did not assess that the above [redacted] memoranda or [redacted] hacked U.S. communications, to be the product of Russian fabrications.”

In contrast to the CIA, the FBI rejected the intelligence and invented flimsy reasons not to trust it. The FBI's dismissive attitude also contrasts sharply with the FBI's credulousness toward any evidence that implictated the Trump campaign.

What’s more, FBI General Counsel James Baker, “unlike his colleagues, did not dismiss the credibility” of the Russian reports that Obama had pressured Attorney General Loretta Lynch to pressure the FBI to drop the investigation into Hillary Clinton's emails, particularly given Lynch's other behaviors.

One of those suspicious behaviors was Lynch's meeting with Bill Clinton on a airport tarmac in Phoenix.

"As his wife is under federal investigation for her use of a private email server, former President Bill Clinton met privately with U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch at the Phoenix Airport Monday evening in what both sides say was an unplanned encounter....The meeting comes as former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is still under investigation for her email practices..."

Another red flag for Baker was that Lynch had asked Comey to downplay the Clinton email investigation by referring to it as a "matter" rather than an investigation.

Everyone involved acknowledged the credibility of the source of the Russian intelligence reports and hacked emails, referred to as “T1,” which appears to have been the Netherlands’ General Intelligence and Security Service (AIVD), which hacked into the Russian hacking group “Cozy Bear,” gaining access to their computers and monitoring them through a security camera in their facility.

“We absolutely believed the [redacted] collection is righteous,” McCabe had told investigators from the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG), even while acknowledging that Russian intelligence reports “typically contain editorialization and spin and hyperbole and all that kind of stuff.”

The comment suggests that the FBI was accustomed to evaluating intelligence and accounting for Russian editorializing and exaggerations rather than dismissing the entire trove of intelligence for the same reasons.

In fact, the FBI was happy to use the Dutch agency’s Cozy Bear intelligence to allege Russian election interference, even while it rejected intelligence from the same Dutch source when it came to the information about Hillary Clinton.

Despite credible evidence of a Clinton Plan to fabricate a scandal accusing Trump of working with Russia to interfere in the election, the FBI appears to have done exactly what Clinton wanted. It opened its Crossfire Hurricane investigation into alleged coordination between Russia and the Trump campaign, and it relied heavily on the Clinton-funded Steele Dossier for investigative and surveillance purposes....

There's much more to this story:

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