As Attorney General William Barr spearheads a "review" of the Russia investigation's origins, a sinking feeling is spreading through the intelligence community, according to CBS News. In short, both current and former intelligence officials are suspicious of Barr's intentions and the appropriateness of him assigning a U.S. attorney to probe the conclusions reached by intelligence analysts that Russian President Vladimir Putin was intervening in the 2016 election in support of Donald Trump. It was a "high confidence" assessment shared by both the CIA and FBI, with the NSA expressing "moderate confidence." Now some agents fear that Barr could be engaging in a round of score settling with former CIA Director John Brennan, who has been an outspoken and forceful critic of Donald Trump.
Former CIA deputy director Michael Morell said he had "no problem" with the Justice Department investigating whether the intelligence community's actions followed the letter to the law. "Having said that," he told CBS, "I see a DOJ review of whether or not the intelligence analysts made the right call as wholly inappropriate. I cannot ever remember a DOJ review of analysis." Morell explained that the predicate for opening intelligence investigations is much lower than the legal standards a prosecutor uses to assess potential criminality. Intelligence analysis is simply not the same thing as a criminal proceeding—there's almost never a smoking gun but rather a series of data points that, strung together, start to form a narrative.
"Any analyst asked to submit to an interview with Durham's investigators will want to have their own personal attorney at their side," he said. "Imagine that—needing an attorney to explain an analytic judgment."
An official with the House Intelligence Committee told CBS that people within the intelligence agencies are expressing "anxiety" and "palpable unease" with the investigation.
The GOP-led congressional reviews of the intelligence assessment in the House and Senate both concluded in 2018 that there was no foul play. The report from the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee called the assessment a "sound intelligence product." Even the conspiracy-driven report from Rep. Devin Nunes's House Intelligence panel found that that majority of intelligence assessment "held up to scrutiny."
Furthermore, special counsel Robert Mueller indicted 12 Russian military officers for hacking and strategically disseminating emails from the Democratic National Committee, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and the Clinton campaign. Additionally, Mueller indicted 13 Russian entities for what then-Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein characterized as "information warfare." The indictment specifically stated that the entities sought "to communicate derogatory information about Hillary Clinton ... and to support Bernie Sanders and then-candidate Donald Trump."
Bottom line, the issue has been heavily scrutinized and even the Republicans who wanted find wrongdoing fell short. Not to mention the fact that the special counsel probe that was overseen by Justice Department officials found enough evidence to bring multiple indictments that jibed squarely with the intelligence assessment. So the idea that the very same Justice Department, under different leadership, is now questioning the intelligence assessment has no basis in reality. The only reasonable conclusion then is that Barr, on behalf of Trump, has launched a conspiracy theory-driven review in search of some nugget he can use to mollify Trump.
This is the U.S. Justice Department we are talking about here. Pathetic.