Gabbard destroys the Russian collusion hoax

 Blaze:

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Gabbard has blown up the Russian collusion narrative for good. Its shell-shocked promoters in the liberal media are now running for cover.

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard published a report on Wednesday that appeared to confirm the 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment on Russian election interference was a work of fiction comprising misquotes, unreliable reports, lies of omissions, and straight-out falsehoods.

Rather than admit fault or come to terms with the role it played in perpetuating an apparent hoax on the American people — one that set the stage for years of Russian-collusion smears, two congressional impeachments, multiple arrests, and greater tensions with a pre-eminent nuclear power — the liberal media is now desperately trying to both downplay the gravity of the newly declassified House Intelligence Committee majority staff report and spin the conclusions therein.

The House Intelligence Committee report is a product of congressional investigators spending over 2,300 hours reviewing the ICA and its source reports, conducting dozens of interviews, and comparing the ICA analytic tradecraft against well-established intelligence reports.

According to the report, the intelligence community had no credible evidence of Russia working to help Trump win.

What's more, the report — which Gabbard indicated provides evidence of a "treasonous conspiracy" — claimed that the ICA, which was released by the Obama administration just weeks before President Donald Trump's inauguration in 2017:incorporated dubious claims despite high-level protest within the intelligence community;

*leaned on the bogus Steele dossier while failing to mention it was produced in part for the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign and had Russian links; 

*omitted narrative-killing evidence such as Moscow's withholding of damning information about Hillary Clinton's health issues, which if released could have helped Trump; and 

*propped the narrative that Russian President Vladimir Putin "aspired" to help Trump win on "one scant, unclear, and unverifiable fragment of a sentence" from a "substandard report" that CIA officers initially omitted but were ordered by then-CIA Director John Brennan to include despite protest.

The report also indicates that the Obama administration leaked falsehoods from the ICA to the media, which publications like the Washington Post dutifully printed.
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I suspect the Clinton campaign was desperate enough to push something for which there was no evidence in order to remain competitive against Trump, and it clearly was not enough to push her over the finish line.  The media should fess up and move on rather than trying to downplay their screw up.

See also:

Gabbard Confirms Obama Referred to DOJ, FBI for ‘Criminal’ Investigation of ‘Russiagate’