A recently declassified report from the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence has shed light on the origins of the 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA), which claimed that Russian President Vladimir Putin favored Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. The document, made public by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, says former CIA Director John Brennan pushed for the inclusion of potentially unreliable and biased reports to support this narrative, despite warnings from intelligence officials about the lack of solid evidence.
Then-President Barack Obama gave the order to release the information.
According to the document:
Acting on President Obama’s orders, DCIA Brennan directed a “full review” and publication of raw HUMINT information that had been collected before the election. CIA officers said that some of this information had been held on orders of the DCIA, while other reporting had been judged by experienced CIA officers to have not met longstanding publication standards. Some of the latter was unclear or from unknown subsources, but would nonetheless be published after the election – on orders of DCIA and cited in the ICA to support claims that Putin aspired to help Trump win.
? BREAKING: DNI Tulsi Gabbard just released reports PROVING that Obama DIRECTLY gave the order to publish the Russia Collusion Hoax, knowing there was no proof that Putin backed Trump
Holy CRAP.
Tulsi just proved Obama lied AGAIN in his statement yesterday.
Obama should be… pic.twitter.com/vLF5c8fde0
— Nick Sortor (@nicksortor) July 23, 2025
The 2020 report, originally classified and stored in a secure vault at CIA headquarters, was the result of an investigation initiated by then-Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.). It criticizes the rushed production of the ICA, which was commissioned by President Barack Obama and overseen by top intelligence leaders, including Brennan.
Drafted primarily by a small team of five CIA analysts, the assessment was finalized just two weeks before Trump’s inauguration, with limited input from the broader intelligence community. This haste, the report argues, led to overlooked issues in sourcing and analysis.
Central to the findings is the assertion that the ICA lacked direct evidence of Putin’s desire to aid Trump’s victory. Instead, it relied on 15 post-election intelligence reports published under Brennan’s direction, three of which were deemed substandard due to their unclear, uncertain, or implausible content. These flawed reports formed the backbone of the ICA’s key judgments, portraying them as credible without disclosing their shortcomings.
Notably, the only classified snippet suggesting Putin “aspired” to help Trump was a vague and unverifiable fragment from one of these problematic sources.
The report further accuses the ICA of cherry-picking intelligence, ignoring or downplaying information that contradicted the preferred narrative. Reliable sources indicated that Russian officials anticipated a Clinton win and believed they could negotiate effectively with her administration. Other intelligence showed Putin was indifferent to the election outcome and even viewed Clinton as a weaker leader who could be more easily influenced. The assessment also failed to explore why Russia did not release additional damaging material on Clinton as the race tightened, despite having opportunities to do so.
Two high-ranking CIA officers reportedly advised Brennan that no concrete evidence existed to support claims of Putin’s pro-Trump bias, yet the ICA proceeded. Additional insights from a close Putin associate, included in the report, described the Russian leader’s apathy toward the candidates, highlighting vulnerabilities in both Trump and Clinton.
This declassification aligns with earlier revelations from 2017 and 2018 House Intelligence Committee interviews with Obama-era officials, such as James Clapper, Susan Rice, Loretta Lynch, Samantha Power, Ben Rhodes, and Andrew McCabe. These figures admitted under oath to lacking any “empirical evidence” of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, consistent with Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s later conclusion of no criminal coordination. Despite this, many continued to promote the collusion story in public statements.
The report also touches on related events, including a July 2016 briefing by Brennan and then-FBI Director James Comey to Obama about intelligence indicating Clinton’s campaign intended to link Trump to Russia as a distraction. In January 2017, Comey briefed Trump on the Steele dossier—a collection of unverified claims funded by Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee—which was dismissed internally as “internet rumor” but still influenced investigations.
Brennan and Comey are currently subjects of an FBI criminal probe related to the Russia investigation, following referrals from former CIA Director John Ratcliffe to FBI Director Kash Patel. Gabbard has also forwarded criminal referrals to the Department of Justice for those accused of producing “manufactured” and “politicized” intelligence.
In response, a spokesperson for Obama dismissed the allegations as “bizarre” and “ridiculous,” emphasizing that they do not undermine the consensus that Russia interfered in the 2016 election to sow discord, though without altering votes.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.