CIA Says Putin 'Probably' Personally Directing Biden Attacks. Sounds Like FBI And NSA Agree!

Watch out for Donald Trump to fire literally everyone this week.

Late last week, FBI Director Christopher Wray testified before Congress and said out loud that Russia is actively attacking the 2020 election, to "sow divisiveness" and "primarily to denigrate Vice President Biden." Donald Trump did not like that.

It engendered this reaction from Trump:

But Chris, you don’t see any activity from China, even though it is a FAR greater threat than Russia, Russia, Russi… https: //t.co/xxF3s6XjkN

— Donald J. Trump (@Donald J. Trump) 1600388434.0 

The wingnut flying monkey noise brigade went full attack mode on Wray, and soon after, rumors started swirling that Trump is going to fire Wray for telling the truth. Because what happens to Trump people who tell the truth about what Russia is doing to attack the election? They get fired. Former Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats got fired for refusing to modify the National Intelligence Assessment to soften the parts about Russia working to get Trump re-elected. His (acting) replacement Admiral Joseph Maguire got fired after the Office of the Director of National Intelligence's top election threats briefer Shelby Pierson told Congress Russia was working to get Trump re-elected.

It's kind of a thing.

Trump wants to fire Wray, in the middle of a pandemic, 42 days from an election he is going to lose, and now in the middle of a Supreme Court fight. Also while Attorney General Bill Barr is pretty clearly planning some sort of October surprise to benefit Trump, which will please Vladimir Putin mightily.

The rightwing mob has been gunning for Wray for a while, but we may need to add CIA Director Gina Haspel to the list, because a new document has leaked about Russia's attack, which goes even further than the documents that have been released or leaked before now. This time it actually says out loud that Putin is "probably" personally directing the Russian attacks on Biden, for Trump's benefit.

The new document is the CIA's very secret Worldwide Intelligence Review, which is compiled by CIA with the assistance of FBI and NSA. It was released internally on August 31.

Russian President Vladimir Putin and his top aides are "probably directing" a Russian foreign influence operation to interfere in the 2020 presidential election against former vice president Joe Biden, which involves a prominent Ukrainian lawmaker connected to President Trump's personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani, a top-secret CIA assessment concluded, according to two sources who reviewed it.

On Aug. 31, the CIA published an assessment of Russian efforts to interfere in the November election in an internal, highly classified report called the CIA Worldwide Intelligence Review, the sources said. CIA analysts compiled the assessment with input from the National Security Agency and the FBI, based on several dozen pieces of information gleaned from public, unclassified and classified intelligence sources. [...]

"We assess that President Vladimir Putin and the senior most Russian officials are aware of and probably directing Russia's influence operations aimed at denigrating the former U.S. Vice President, supporting the U.S. president and fueling public discord ahead of the U.S. election in November," the first line of the document says, according to the sources.

This may seem like a minor point, but it's actually quite big when you look at the news from a bird's eye view. It was a huge deal in 2016 when the Obama administration actually personally fingered Putin and said it had evidence he had personally ordered the Hillary Clinton attacks. It was also a huge deal when all 17 intelligence agencies   agreed on what was happening. Before that, during the 2016 campaign, people were able to cling to ideas like "yeah but the NSA says it's not sure," as if it were a gun or a Bible. Then everybody got on the same page.

Now, everybody — all of Trump's everybodies — is getting on the same page. William Evanina, director of the National Counterintelligence and Security Center (NCSC), which is part of ODNI, released a statement that said Russia is actively attacking the election for Trump, and confirming that Russia is a far greater threat to this election than 'GIIIIIIIIINA, despite what Trump and Bill Barr would have you believe. Secret documents have been leaking out of the Department of Homeland Security like it's a sieve, because of how it sure looks like (acting) DHS Secretary Chad Wolf is personally working to cover up the ongoing Russian attack for Trump. Steven Mnuchin's Treasury Department sanctioned that Ukrainian dickweasel Andriy Derkach, Rudy Giuliani's big buddy, who's been feeding propaganda lies about Joe Biden to useful idiots in Congress like GOP Senator Ron Johnson and Devin Nunes, as a literal actual Russian agent.

So that's ODNI, DHS, and Treasury. And with this document, here comes CIA, with an assist from FBI and NSA. We already had reporting that the CIA had been backing away slowly from Johnson's Kremlin-inspired investigation, because they didn't want to run the risk of inadvertently participating in a Russian influence op .

And though it's something we just always assumed to be true, it's also a big deal that allllllll the big guys, CIA, FBI, and NSA, are saying, at least to themselves and to each other, that yeah, that's probably what's happening here, even if it seems obvious.

They're getting specific, too, though they don't talk about the Rudy Giuliani connection to Derkach's Russian influence op out loud:

The CIA assessment described Derkach's efforts in detail and said that his activities have included working through lobbyists, members of Congress and U.S. media organizations to disseminate and amplify his anti-Biden information. Though it refers to Derkach's interactions with a "prominent" person connected to the Trump campaign, the analysis does not identify the person. Giuliani, who has been working with Derkach publicly for several months, is not named in the assessment.

And this document is being leaked right now, just as Ron Johnson has been teasing that he's about to release his super-important and very real report about how Joe Biden did nefarious things in Ukraine, which is based entirely on Russian propaganda, far as we can see!

This is what Donald Trump and his political appointees are trying to cover up, so that Russia can help steal American democracy for him (again).

Keep your eye out for Trump firings this week, because the shitshow is only just beginning.

Have a nice day!

[ Washington Post ]

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