Acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell is working to declassify documents relating to the investigations of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and, according to Fox News’ Ed Henry, some of those declassified documents will actually show a Russian effort to benefit Hillary Clinton during the election, not Donald Trump.
Henry told Fox News host Tucker Carlson on Tuesday’s “Tucker Carlson Tonight” that four or five new batches of intelligence are being declassified, one of which contains an assessment that Brennan sought to suppress, showing that Russia wanted Clinton to win.
“Remember the U.S. intel community came out with that remarkable statement, an assessment that Russia meddled in the 2016 election, and most importantly the intel report claimed that Russia interfered because they wanted Donald Trump to win,” Henry said. “That of course followed the narrative of the now-discredited Steele Dossier. Well, it turns out Obama’s CIA chief, John Brennan also had intel saying ‘actually Russia wanted Hillary Clinton to win because she was a known quantity, she had been secretary of state, and Vladimir Putin’s team thought she was more malleable, while candidate Donald Trump was unpredictable.”
Henry credited Fred Fleitz, a former CIA officer and National Security Council chief of staff, for initially raising the allegation Brennan suppressed the intelligence findings of Russian interference to benefit Clinton. In a recent Fox News opinion article, Fleitz described reviewing unclassified intelligence and having conversations with House Intelligence Committee staffers who interviewed CIA officers and reviewed the intelligence. Fleitz said, based on his review, that Brennan was concealing “high-quality intelligence” supporting Russian motives to help Clinton, while promoting “flawed substandard information” that instead implicated a Russian effort to help Trump.
On Tuesday night, Henry said he also spoke with another intelligence community source who confirmed to him that evidence of Russia’s interest in helping Clinton win would be among the upcoming batches of documents to be declassified.
If the documents to be declassified prove accurate by Henry’s description, they may conflict with the bipartisan conclusion of an April 21 Senate Intelligence Committee report, lead by Republican Sen. Richard Burr of North Carolina. While the report remains heavily redacted, Burr said in a statement accompanying the report, that “the Committee found no reason to dispute the Intelligence Community’s conclusions,” referring to the existing assessment of a Russian effort to help Trump.
Grenell recently released the transcripts of 53 interviews conducted by the House Intelligence Committee from the investigation of alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.
Henry also told Carlson that Grenell had also provided the U.S. Department of Justice with a list of names of Obama era officials involved in “unmasking” the names of Trump campaign associates swept up in surveillance on foreign officials. One particular “unmasking” effort involved Trump’s incoming National Security Advisor Gen. Michael Flynn in a conversation he had with a Russian ambassador during the Trump team’s transition into the White House. Flynn’s “unmasked” conversation became the topic of a criminal prosecution against him that the Justice Department recently requested to withdraw.
