(American Greatness via Zero Hedge)—Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard did an excellent service to our nation this week when she released a declassified version of a critical September 2020 House Intelligence Committee staff report on a major January 2017 intelligence report, known as an Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA), titled “Russia’s Influence Campaign Targeting the 2016 US Presidential Election.”
Gabbard’s decision came after a years-long tug-of-war over the release of this report between Republican members of Congress who believe it provides critical information about the Russia collusion hoax and the involvement of Obama officials and the U.S. Intelligence Community versus Democratic congressmen and deep state intelligence officials who have desperately tried to hide this report from the American public.
Press accounts have reported most of the essential details of the House report, such as how it was rushed out on President Obama’s orders to be published just before Trump’s first inauguration in January 2017. Media stories have also detailed how substandard intelligence was used to justify the ICA’s finding that Russia meddled in the 2016 election to help Donald Trump win and that this bad intelligence was included on the orders of CIA Director John Brennan over the objections of senior CIA analysts. The media has also reported the House Intelligence report’s finding that a hand-picked group of five analysts wrote the ICA and that it was not adequately vetted by U.S. intelligence agencies and analysts. It is also clear in the House report that, despite numerous statements by Brennan denying it, the fraudulent Steele dossier was heavily used in the ICA.
I am very familiar with the House Intelligence Committee report. I was permitted to read a classified version of the report when I served as Chief of Staff of the National Security Council in August 2018. I also discussed efforts by the White House to pressure the CIA to release the report a month before the 2020 presidential election with the late Lou Dobbs. This reportedly included President Trump visiting the CIA to retrieve the report personally.
Based on my understanding of this issue, here are five key points about the House Intelligence Committee report that most Americans may not be aware of.
1. The House Intelligence Committee report is a credible and carefully drafted paper.
Although the House report was written by the House Intelligence Committee’s Republican staff, its fairness and balance are a credit to its authors and then-Chairman Devin Nunes.
The report says on page 1 that committee investigators spent over 2,300 hours reviewing the ICA and its source reports and interviewed 20 intelligence and FBI officers. Its conclusions reflect objectivity and would not be found in a biased, partisan report. For example, the House report concedes at the beginning that the ICA’s finding that Russia meddled in the 2016 election to undermine faith in the U.S. democratic process and to weaken an inevitable Clinton presidency used proper intelligence tradecraft. However, the House report took issue with the ICA’s distortions of intelligence tradecraft standards to assess that Putin had a clear preference for Trump to win and “aspired to help his chances of victory.”
The House Intelligence report also includes strong, nonpartisan recommendations, including a call for political appointees of outgoing administrations to recuse themselves from any involvement in intelligence reports drafted in the future under similar circumstances.
I spoke with the two principal authors of the House report after I read it in August 2018. I found them to be professional and knowledgeable. They answered all my questions and provided me with additional information that was not in the report. A CIA official told me earlier this month that one of the authors had been retained by the Agency to prepare the report for release.
2. The Republican House report is more credible than a similar bipartisan Senate report.
The authors of the House Intelligence Committee report told me they believed their report, written by the committee’s Republican staff, was more credible than a bipartisan report would be because many of the CIA officers they interviewed would not have spoken to a bipartisan investigation team. The reason was that Democratic staff and members of a bipartisan investigation might inform agency management about which agency officers had spoken to committee investigators, potentially leading to retaliation. I agree and believe this is why recent attempts by liberal reporters and Democratic congressmembers to use a similar bipartisan report by the Senate Intelligence Committee issued in April 2020 to discredit the House Intelligence Committee report are not credible.
3. The ICA omitted intelligence that Putin may have wanted Clinton to win the 2016 election.
Many press reports about the House Intelligence Committee report focused on how weak and fragmentary intelligence was used to support the ICA’s assessment that Russia wanted Trump to win the 2016 election. However, the House report also notes that the ICA ignored two significant alternative hypotheses suggested by the intelligence and Russian behavior: that Putin either did not care who won the 2016 election or wanted Hillary Clinton to win.
The House report said some of the omitted intelligence analysis indicated that Putin did not have a preference in the election outcome because both Trump and Clinton would be bad for Russia and unlikely to improve relations.
Also notable was the omitted analysis that Putin may have wanted Clinton to win the 2016 election because she would be a more vulnerable president than Trump and Russia had a reserve of compromising materials to use against Clinton but not Trump. Similarly, the House report also noted that the ICA did not address that Moscow viewed Clinton as a weaker candidate due to Russian intelligence reporting on her psychological health. In addition, the House report said the timing and content of Russian operational orders “indicated that Moscow assumed they had unique leverage over Secretary Clinton that would be more useful if she won the election.”
On the other hand, the House report said some senior Russian officials worried that a Trump administration would have a hardline national security team hostile to Russia. The report also quoted a redacted Russian source who “cautioned about the risks to Russia of a Republican administration, noting that ‘those who would hold positions in a Trump administration should he win will likely adhere to conservative anti-Russia positions.’”
4. The House Intelligence Committee report was stuck for years in the “turducken safe” at the CIA for political reasons and due to CIA Director Gina Haspel’s inept and partisan leadership.
Although the House report was completed by the summer of 2018 and considered an important and damning indictment of the Obama administration and U.S. intelligence agencies for politicizing intelligence to promote the Russia collusion hoax, House Republicans and the Trump White House were unable to convince CIA Director Gina Haspel to declassify and clear the report for release to the public.
Then-House Intelligence Committee Chairman Nunes sent the report to the CIA for clearance in the summer of 2018. The CIA dragged its feet in clearing the report and failed to do so before Nunes lost the committee chairmanship in January 2019, due to the Democrats winning control of the House in the 2018 election. After Congressman Adam Schiff succeeded Nunes as chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, the CIA refused to clear the report because Nunes was no longer the chairman and Schiff would not sign off on Nunes’s release request.
Because of the confusing politics and competing jurisdictions over the House report, it was kept at the CIA in a safe within a safe, leading the New York Times to call this the “turducken safe”—a gun box-like container controlled by the House Intelligence Committee’s Republican members and located inside a CIA vault. The House Intelligence Committee’s Republican members refused to grant Democratic committee members access to their safe or allow them to review the report.
Haspel and NSA Director Paul Nakasone also objected to releasing the report, claiming it would reveal sensitive intelligence. In addition, Haspel and Nakasone reportedly opposed releasing the House report because they asserted it contained unverified information and “cherry-picked” intelligence. Democratic congressmembers also strongly opposed the release of the House Republican report. In opposing the report’s release in late 2020, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Schiff charged that the report sought to whitewash Russia’s election interference in the 2016 presidential election.
Regardless of how ardently Haspel and Nakasone held their positions opposing the release of the House report, because the president is ultimately in charge of all U.S. intelligence and classification decisions, their refusal to cooperate with White House orders to release the report was, in my opinion, insubordination to a U.S. president. Moreover, DNI Gabbard’s action this week proved there were no valid national security reasons not to release a declassified version of this report.
5. President Trump and his senior White House staff regarded the House intelligence report as so crucial that Trump reportedly considered going to the CIA before the 2020 election to retrieve and release the report himself.
According to my sources at the White House and the House Intelligence Committee, the White House believed in the fall of 2020 that it was crucial for the American people to read this House report before the November 2020 presidential election.
The White House ordered CIA Director Haspel to release the report before the election. She refused.
I received a phone call about this matter in late October 2020 from Lou Dobbs, the host of the Fox Business Network show “Lou Dobbs Tonight” and a close friend of President Trump. I often appeared on Dobbs’ show as a former CIA analyst. He called to consult with me about a possible trip by President Trump to CIA headquarters to retrieve the House Intelligence Committee report so he could release it. I told Dobbs that I feared this would not work because CIA Director Haspel would learn about the president’s visit in advance and hide the inner safe containing the report before he arrived. Dobbs agreed with me and said he would convey this to President Trump. Trump’s alleged visit to the CIA to seize the House report never took place.
I would like to again thank Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard for finally releasing the House Intelligence Committee’s critical report on how President Obama, senior Obama officials, and intelligence officials were responsible for issuing a rigged and politicized intelligence assessment just before Donald Trump’s first inauguration to destroy his presidency. This fraudulent intelligence report hounded Trump throughout his first term and contributed to his first sham impeachment in 2019. This perversion of U.S. intelligence also did grave damage to the objectivity and trustworthiness of America’s intelligence agencies, from which they still have not recovered.
It is my sincere hope that the declassified House Intelligence Committee report and other documents on the Russia collusion hoax released by DNI Gabbard and CIA Director Ratcliffe will lead to prosecutions of those involved and congressional hearings that ensure accountability and to send a strong message to future administration officials and intelligence officers that if they participate in another scheme to weaponize American intelligence to meddle in U.S. politics or to destroy a presidency, there will be severe consequences.
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.