Byron York’s Daily Memo: What did Obama know?

WHAT DID OBAMA KNOW? The declassification of notes written in 2016 by former CIA Director John Brennan highlight — they don’t solve, but they highlight — one of the biggest mysteries of the Trump-Russia investigation. We know that the Obama administration’s intelligence and law enforcement agencies targeted the Trump campaign in the last three months of the 2016 campaign, and after that in the transition. But how much did President Barack Obama know about it? That’s the mystery.

The heavily-redacted notes were declassified by Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe. In Brennan’s own handwriting, they show that Brennan personally briefed Obama that U.S. intelligence had learned that Russian spies had collected information about an alleged Clinton campaign plan, approved by Hillary Clinton herself, to link rival candidate Donald Trump to Russia’s hacking of Democratic National Committee emails. Clinton, according to the Russian intelligence, wanted to divert public attention away from the scandal surrounding her use of a personal email system.

“We’re getting additional insight into Russia activities from [REDACTED],” the notes said, indicating the source of the insight was blacked out by the Intelligence Community before release. The notes said the source alleged that Hillary Clinton had personally approved “a proposal from one of her foreign policy advisers to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by the Russian security service.”

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What might that mean? Well, we already know that on July 24, 2016, when the DNC hack was in the news, Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook went on TV to allege that Trump was somehow linked to the Russian hack. That same day, the New York Times reported that portraying Trump as too close to Russia was “emerging as a theme of Mrs. Clinton’s campaign.” So everyone knows that the Clinton campaign, in public, was trying to link Trump to the Russian hack.

Now, what some Republicans worry about is that the Brennan notes suggest the Clinton campaign was doing more than just talk. Somewhere around that time in 2016, the campaign and the DNC engaged the opposition research firm Fusion GPS, which in turn hired the former British spy Christopher Steele to compile what later became known as the “dossier.” The dossier, as everyone knows now, was a series of false claims that the Trump campaign was working with Russia to influence the election. It also contained the salacious and false story alleging that in a Moscow hotel room in 2013, private citizen Trump watched as prostitutes performed a kinky sex act — and Russian spies videotaped the whole thing.

What is unknown now is whether the newly-declassified notes suggest a Clinton campaign plan that resulted in the creation of the dossier — and whether Obama knew about it. We do know that the FBI embraced Steele — they literally wanted to hire him to do his anti-Trump work during the final months of the campaign. We know that the FBI, including then-Director James Comey, wanted to include unverified information from the dossier in the Intelligence Community Assessment of Russian interference in the 2016 election. And we know that on January 5, 2017, Comey briefed the Moscow hotel room story to President Obama and then, the next day, to President-elect Trump.

Brennan tried to cast doubt on the story in an appearance on CNN Monday. “These were my notes from the 2016 period when I briefed President Obama and the rest of the National Security Council team about what the Russians were up to, and I was giving examples of the type of access that the U.S. Intelligence community had to Russian information and what the Russians were talking about and alleging,” Brennan said. “Now if, in fact, what the Russians were alleging was that Hillary was trying to highlight the reported connections between Trump and the Russians, if in fact that was accurate — and that’s a big ‘if’ — there is nothing at all illegal about that.”

That is not exactly a denial. In 2017, 2018, and 2019, during special counsel Robert Mueller’s Trump-Russia investigation, it was often remarked that collusion was not illegal, and yet that did not keep the media from talking constantly about it. Now, Brennan is seeking to downplay the new notes by arguing that even if true, they do not suggest anything illegal. Fine. But it might still be a very big deal. And we need more declassification, more information, to get a fuller picture of what Brennan and other top Obama officials — including President Obama himself — were up to in 2016.