DNI frustrates Democrat leak attempts

The Lid:

...
The latest development in this saga is a complaint by Democrats about the DNI move, conveyed in a letter on 28 August, to brief Congress on election security via written documents, with few if any closed-door, in-person briefings being given on Capitol Hill. They will get the same information as before, but in written form.

The formal reason for this is that the DNI doesn’t want members of Congress making selective, misleading leaks about such briefings. Politico, which has the latest story, has faithfully written up earlier episodes in which leaks of this kind appear to have occurred.

But I’m not so sure they were actually leaks. My take, looking at the sum total of the tale so far, is that the existence of in-person briefings has allowed Democrats to feed information to the media about things that didn’t really happen. In other words, the Hill Democrats weren’t “leaking” things they had been briefed on. They were using a classified briefing as a pretext to feed a propaganda line to the media under the pretense that they were “leaking.”

They were just making stuff up.

There were hints that this was occurring early in 2020 when House Democrats claimed to have been briefed by an ODNI official that Russia was meddling in the 2020 election with the intention of getting Trump reelected. Since the same official, only days earlier, had said in an NPR interview that the intelligence community hadn’t drawn a conclusion about specific efforts by Russia in this year’s election, the claim of the Democrats was quickly called into question.

In a rare public response, the acting DNI, Richard Grenell, came out with clarifying information about the actual position of the IC on Russian interference in 2020. He also announced that ODNI would be taking good care to communicate a single, authoritative message on crucial national security topics like election security – a subtle signal that the intel community’s no-kidding assessments would come from the intel community, and not [timpani flourish] from the background “leaks” of Congress members or staffers on the Hill.

Fast-forward to early August 2020, and an intelligence “report” on election security published by the National Counterintelligence Security Center (NCSC), a subordinate agency of ODNI. I wrote it up at the time, characterizing the report as inane. I stand by that characterization, but elaboration by Politico on the shenanigans surrounding it on Capitol Hill sheds light on why it may have turned out as it did.

It appears, in hindsight, that the report was published as a way of putting something on the record, to stop made-up stuff “leaked” by Democrats from hijacking the intel community’s public disclosures about election security and potential election interference.
...

This looks like Democrats are trying to lay the groundwork for another Russian collusion hoax.   They are being thwarted by not being able to make stuff up about what was said in a classified intelligence brief.