Washington Examiner investigations editor Sarah Bedford said newly declassified emails from the Russia collusion probe are “pretty damning,” after Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard released them on Wednesday.
Speaking on the Hugh Hewitt show, Bedford noted that former President Barack Obama’s National Security Agency Director, Mike Rogers, appeared to feel pressured to reach a predetermined conclusion and that his team lacked sufficient time to fully review the evidence.
“There was so much pressure coming from the most partisan of the leaders to reach a premeditated conclusion,” Bedford said of the newly released files.
Gabbard, along with CIA Director John Ratcliffe, has been gradually releasing documents suggesting that the 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment on Russian interference in the 2016 election was compromised.
A declassified statement published Thursday included claims from a senior U.S. intelligence official-turned-whistleblower, who said Obama officials pressured him to endorse flawed findings in the report.
Bedford argued that corporate media outlets are “obscuring” the significance of what Gabbard and Ratcliffe have made public.
“We’re now learning that it looks like these intel officials didn’t follow procedures because they intended to reach a false conclusion implicating Trump and Putin in some sort of conspiracy,” Bedford said. “If they had followed procedures, they would’ve been caught doing that.”
Former DNI James Clapper, in one of the declassified emails, described the investigation as a “team sport.”
“We will facilitate as much mutual transparency as possible as we complete the report, but, more time is not negotiable,” Clapper wrote. “We may have to compromise on our ‘normal’ modalities, since we must do this on such a compressed schedule.”
According to Bedford, career analysts and less partisan voices within the intelligence community were “silenced” when they raised concerns.
She added that Clapper, along with then-CIA Director John Brennan and then-FBI Director James Comey, “already decided they were going to invent a conclusion for which there was no evidence, and that is why they cut these corners.”
Bedford concluded that if prosecutions follow regarding the conduct of intelligence leaders during the investigation, the mainstream media will no longer be able to “ignore” the revelations.
