by WorldTribune Staff, July 28, 2025 Real World News
CIA Director John Ratcliffe on Sunday backed Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Tulsi Gabbard's report on Russiagate and said more documents will soon be declassified and made public. He characterized the scandal as an "ongoing conspiracy" against a sitting U.S. president by top intelligence officials.
“What hasn’t come out yet, and what’s going to come out, is the underlying intelligence in the John Durham report classified annex,” Ratcliffe told Fox News’s “Sunday Morning Futures.”
“What that intelligence shows is that part of this was a Hillary Clinton plan, but part of it was an FBI plan to be an accelerant to that fake Steele dossier, to those fake Russian collusion claims, by pouring oil on the fire, by amplifying the lie and burying the truth of what Hillary Clinton was up to,” Ratcliffe told host Maria Bartiromo.
Documents declassified by Gabbard in recent days show President Barack Obama ordering CIA brass to revise their post-election assessment that Russia had not substantially interfered in the 2016 presidential contest.
Ratcliffe said on Sunday that key players in the FBI and CIA, among them former CIA Director John Brennan and former FBI Director James Comey, were involved in a conspiracy against President Donald Trump, which he said is ongoing and can be prosecuted within the statute of limitations.
Ratcliffe said Comey’s congressional testimony about the matter, which took place in September 2020, “is completely inconsistent with what our underlying intelligence that is about to be declassified reflects.”
Gabbard said intelligence community whistleblowers are revealing more about the Russiagate scandal and emphasized the legacy media's "complicity".
“We have whistleblowers … coming forward now, after we released these documents because there are people who were around, who were working within the intelligence community who are so disgusted by what happened,” Gabbard told Fox News. “We’re starting to see some of them come out of the woodwork here because they, too, like you and I and the American people, want to see justice delivered.”
In a Saturday interview on "Fox & Friends Weekend," Gabbard noted the legacy media's striking lack of coverage of Obama's involvement in the Russia hoax.
"It's been interesting to see how the mainstream media has either refused to cover this story at all, the headlines or the lack thereof of newspapers, Washington Post, New York Times and others in the days following this release have actually been quite deafening in their lack of coverage," Gabbard said.
"And it's interesting to see how when they do cover this, they don't actually cover the revelations that these intelligence reports and the evidence that we released actually conveys to the American people. They simply talk about their criticisms of it or convey Democrat politicians' criticisms of it, but none of them actually dealing with the truth that has been revealed. And to me, there's two reasons for that."
Gabbard continued: "Number one is they don't want the American people to know the truth, but also they recognize the mainstream media's complicity in this, that they were fed early lines from this manufactured false intelligence assessment that President Obama ordered, that John Brennan and James Clapper created without any vetting, without any actual journalistic integrity of looking at what they were being fed. They received it and they printed it almost immediately. And then they went on to double down and triple down on this over the next several years.
"I look back at the Iraq WMD, manufactured false intelligence to support an action to go to war in another country. And I went back and looked at the mainstream media's complicity in that. Did they ever admit that they were wrong, that they failed as journalists?
"Really they didn't. A couple of them gave some lame excuses, but there's a lot of parallels here for us to take a step back and look at, again, the magnitude of what has been revealed and why it's important to every American, not just Democrats or Republicans, but it really has to do with the foundational principles of our democratic republic and the integrity of that. That is the thing that I think a lot of the mainstream media folks, again, have refused to cover at all or are failing to focus on."
Meanwhile, the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC) is reeling after taking yet another major blow to its credibility, The Washington Times reported on Saturday.
The report cited CIA analysts as saying that newly released declassified material shows how much the intelligence community became politicized and weaponized against its opponents, starting with Obama and later Team Biden.
Brennan said after the release of the material that he has “lawyered up.”
Fred Fleitz, a former CIA analyst who spent nearly two decades with the spy agency, said he thinks “the whole thing really undermined the reputation of U.S. intelligence, not just CIA.”
“It made it look like it’s a big political game. There’s always some politics, but it was never as bad as it was until Trump became president,” he said, citing alleged partisan misuse of intelligence by then-Rep. Adam Schiff, California Democrat, and Brennan. “There always [were] some guardrails that people wouldn’t cross, but they were all broken when Trump became president, and I still don’t think it’s recovered.”
Fleitz told The Washington Times that his friends in the IC “really despise Brennan.”
“I think he was a political hack who did a lot of damage to the agency, not just with this Intelligence Community Assessment [ICA], and with his promotion of the Steele dossier, [named after British MI6 officer Christopher Steele], but with years of political commentary on MSNBC attacking Trump,” he said. “As a former CIA officer, that’s just not done. It’s not dignified, and it really angered Trump, and it made Trump distrust American intelligence even more.”
