Before There Were the Seditious Six, There Was the Committee to Investigate Russia

Before there were the Seditious Six, there was the Committee to Investigate Russia (CIR), a nonprofit group co-founded in 2017 by the late Rob Reiner, focused on propagating the claim that the Russians interfered in the 2016 US elections and that Donald Trump was “Putin’s Puppet”.

CIR’s advisory board included former intelligence officials, such as James Clapper (Obama’s former Director of National Intelligence) and Michael Morell (Obama’s former acting CIA Director).

Reiner is seen in this CIR-produced video in 2018 with James Clapper and former CIA Director John Brennan, moderating a discussion about the “threat to democracy” posed by Donald Trump.

It is breathtaking to watch these three clowns – supposed heavies in their respective fields – stooping so low in the production of this PR campaign to influence the opinion of Americans that Donald Trump was a “Russian Agent”.

Brennan, Clapper and Morell and 49 other “Spies Who Lied” returned in 2020 with another PSYOP, flasely claiming that Hunter Biden’s Laptop from Hell was “Russian Disinformation” – some of them, while they were on the CIA’s payroll.

James Clapper has been caught lying to the public many times. Attorney Jonathan Turley, for one thinks he should be charged with perjury for lying about leaking the phony “Pee-Pee Dossier” information to the media.

John Brennan was referred for criminal prosecution in October by the House Judiciary Committee over allegations that he “knowingly made false statements” to Congress about his role in the Russia Hoax.

What drove Reiner’s unchained TDS? What drove this scion of Hollywood royalty into an unholy alliance with seditious Feds? Who is really pulling the strings of these people, causing them to say and do things that risk their reputations, their retirements and their freedom from prison?

Russophobia is a hallmark of the British government, which is preparing to draft its population to go to war with Russia, as we speak.

British Intelligence is heavily-implicated in a slew of anti-Trump ops, starting with the GCHQ’s initial reports to US Intelligence of “suspicious interactions” between Trump’s 2016 campaign and “Russian agents”.

British-American MI6 and CIA asset, Stefan Halper acted as an FBI informant during “Crossfire Hurricane” while they were spying on Trump’s 2016 campaign.

Former MI6 head Richard Dearlove has been accused by critics of coordinating with Halper to target Trump aides. Dearlove denied direct involvement but acknowledged meeting “Pee-Pee” author and former MI6 officer, Christopher Steele after the 2016 election.

Many allege that Trump’s first CIA Director, Gina Haspel was directing “influence operations” against Trump – including coordinating with British assets – while she was still CIA Chief of Station in London.

Russophobia is also pronounced among the children of Trotskyites claiming to be Neocons. Rob Reiner’s co-founder of the Committee to Investigate Russia is renowned Neocon, David Frum.

Publicly available information on the financing of the CIR is limited. The organization was “mostly funded through donations” but no specific major donors, foundations, or large-scale financiers have been publicly identified in credible reporting. No IRS Form 990 tax filings are publicly available. The group ceased active operations on March 29, 2019, shortly after the release of the Mueller Report, and archived its website for reference.

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TRANSCRIPT

Rob Reiner: Either person can sit at either place, whatever’s good for you.

John Brennan: I don’t think either one of us has a good side, so it doesn’t matter. You don’t have a good side, it doesn’t matter.

James Clapper: We’re both bad sides.

Rob Reiner: Alright, me too. We’re both of the follicly-challenged.

Rob Reiner: So, thank you for coming, I really appreciate it. The thing that to me is so frustrating is that this cataclysmic thing happened to our country and people don’t seem to understand it, understand the gravity of it. And you guys were talking about how it’s unusual for people who have been… How many years of experience do you have between you, would you say?

John Brennan: Well, Jim has several hundred, I think.

James Clapper: Probably 80 or 90 between the two of us.

Rob Reiner: So, here you are with all that experience. Have you ever seen anything like this happen in this country? I mean, anything like this kind of attack on our political system?

James Clapper: Well, no. Not, at least to me, as disturbing as this. I’m a Vietnam War veteran. I went through all the stresses in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. But I never felt, even then, that our fundamental institutions were jeopardized. In fact, our fundamental institutions proved themselves resilient, then. And we actually came out of all that a better country. And hopefully, we’ll have the same experience now.

John Brennan: To me, it underscores two points. One is how determined Mr Putin is to shape the political landscape, both inside of Russia as well as outside of Russia.

Whether it be in Europe or the United States or the Middle East or other places, he seeks ways to manipulate and exploit the environments. But secondly, it really does underscore just how consequential that digital domain is. And as Jim noted, we’ve seen these things being done by the Russians over the course of many years.

But the fact now that this digital environment, this cybersphere, gives the Russian intelligence security services so much more opportunity to manipulate and to exploit. And they took full advantage of that in the 2016 election. That’s why we saw things of much greater concern and intensity than we’d ever seen before.

And I think Americans really need to understand just how vulnerable we are to exploitation of the environment by malign actors around the globe.

Rob Reiner: Is it something that we did not see happening, that we couldn’t foresee? Because we talked about 9-11, the planes hitting a building. It seems like they found a huge seam in the arsenal.

James Clapper: Russians – this goes back to the Soviet Era – there’s a long history of them intervening and influencing elections, theirs and other people’s. And there’s historical records that they’ve attempted to interfere in virtually all of our national elections since the ’60s but never, never this aggressive, direct, or multidimensional.

And of course, as John indicated, they’re taking advantage of a huge enabler. You know, the internet and all the technology that that gives you and the ability to influence opinion. A way they’ve found to attack us is to undermine our fundamental system.

Rob Reiner: I don’t think, from my standpoint, I don’t think that we, in all of the technological revolution that we’ve seen over the years, I don’t think we have fully understood the power of what it could do. I mean, we certainly understood spreading information, getting word out, being able to cross boundaries with information.

But I don’t think we ever thought – I mean, I don’t know if you hadn’t thought – how it could be weaponized to this extent. I mean, was that something that occurred to you, or did you see that as something that happened?

James Clapper: Well, for me, probably not. That’s why, when this all began to unfold, in ’15 and ’16, and it was kind of insidious. As we became more aware of what they were doing, and then I think in the late summer, early fall of ’16, when you really saw the magnitude of what they were doing.

And for me, I’ve seen a lot of bad stuff in my 50 years in intelligence, but nothing I don’t recall anything that gave me viscerally in the pit of my stomach a more uncomfortable, uneasy feeling than when I realized what the Russians were doing.

Rob Reiner: Right.

John Brennan: The Russians have conducted active measures for many, many years and in the physical domain, you have certain indicators and signatures that you can forensically then connect so that you can trace it back then to the ultimate perpetrator or who directed it.

But now, just like with terrorists and organized criminals and others, intelligence services can do things in that cyber domain that they can really camouflage and mask their steps. So I think we always anticipated that the Russians will continue to try to exploit certain situations, but now with this digital environment, it’s become much more challenging for intelligence, security, and law enforcement services to understand exactly who is behind some of these activities that really make it very challenging for us to understand who is actually directing these actions.

Rob Reiner: You guys were there when you saw the initial attack. And you hear this term all the time, “collusion, conspiracy, coordination”. I mean, these things are thrown around all over the place but the idea of active measures; that the Russians have trafficked in forever.

What does that look like? In a political campaign like this, what does an active measure look like?

John Brennan: Well, I think a lot of times what the Russians, as well as others do, is to either fabricate a story or to take a story that may be patently false, but yet advances one’s narrative and argument and push it out and propagate it and lends legitimacy to it. It’s a way to color people’s perceptions and impressions of individuals.

Rob Reiner: I understand that St. Petersburg is pushing out trolls and bots and getting messages out and piggybacking on messages that the Trump campaign is doing. Is there any granularity to getting into these districts in Wisconsin or Michigan? Do they play on that level?

James Clapper: It appears now that it was pretty sophisticated, and they did focus on certain voter blocs. And, of course, 70- or 80,000 votes in three states would have swung the election. And apparently the Russians have gone to school on our system, understand it.

We’ve had very successful campaigns in this country, President Obama, case in point, where they did this microanalysis on a district-by-district, precinct-by-precinct basis. They would understand that, based on just observing American television, or they need some kind of help through a Cambridge Analytica or people on the ground who have been assets that have been developed over many years.

James Clapper: That’s a good question. They could have. But it’s very clear that they understood the political dynamics, the political landscape here, and they certainly understood how to use tools to exploit it.

John Brennan: The Russians take full advantage of the openness of our society. They have operated here in the United States for many, many years. So they can have access to experts and others who they try to elicit information from, even those individuals who do not even know that they’re interacting or supporting the Russians.

So we’re looking at the different attack vectors. Information was one of them in terms of what they were pushing out. Collecting information from the Internet in terms of the e-mail theft that went on with the DCCC, the DNC.

But also we knew, from experience that the Russians had many different methods of influencing elections in Europe: Getting politicians to accept money, trying to push money into political parties, maybe camouflaging the source, and extorting and even blackmailing individuals to work with them. We’ve seen that across the board, and there’s a lot of publicly available information and stories about that.

Rob Reiner: To try to understand the intersection between money-laundering, cyber warfare, and influence peddling. I mean, how does all of that work?

James Clapper: Well, to the extent that you can hide the money, hide the disguised sources of funding for political action groups, which may be quite legitimate, they’ll use financial instrumentalities to hide the passage of that funding to political movements or interest groups.

But I do know that collusion is clearly a tool in the kit bag that the Russians will use. So any way they can co-opt somebody, recruit them, influence them, even where the party that they’re recruiting is unwitting, they’ll do it. And I suspect they did so at every opportunity where they saw an opening, they’ll exploit it.

John Brennan: But following that financial trail is so critically important on so many aspects of national security. We do it in the terrorism realm, we do it in the counterintelligence realm, we do it in the proliferation arena, as well.

And the FBI financial investigators, as well as the intelligence community financial analysts, they are tremendous. And that’s why I do have confidence that Bob Mueller and others are going to get to the bottom of some of this by tracing the money and see what might have circumvented the normal procedures for moving money. And was there a motivation, a political motivation behind it, either on the giver or the receiver’s part?

Rob Reiner: I mean, listen, we talk about, you know, our system, our democratic way of life came under attack. I mean, we use those terms, you know, because they attacked an election. But we don’t talk about it in terms of war. I mean, you know, it’s cyber war and it’s, you know, there’s no tanks, there’s no planes, there’s no infantry. I mean, there’s none of that.

And yet, perhaps Putin thinks of it as, I mean, because if you say it’s been going on for a long time, which it has been since probably the czarist days, it is a war. It’s a war for a wrestling for an ideology, whether or not democracy is going to survive. He’s been trying to undermine it for forever. So in his mind, it is a war. So how do we, how do we respond?

John Brennan: I think we have to strengthen that cyber environment, certainly. We learned some very painful lessons because of 9/11. But as a result of 9/11, the Congress established a commission, 9/11 Commission, that tried to address those gaps, those shortcomings. I have been a long proponent of having a similar type of commission established by Congress, an independent commission, that can take a look at what we need to do in the future to better protect and safeguard that environment.

And have the engineers and futurists and technologists and scientists and US officials and private sector, all of them getting together, something akin to a major, major undertaking to look at it strategically.

So, trying to strengthen that environment, and it’s not just against attempts to interfere in the election, but also, again, criminals and terrorists and pedophiles and others. And I don’t think we as a country have yet come to terms with what the role of the government is in that environment.

Rob Reiner: And why do you think that that didn’t happen? I mean, when the buildings were hit, or when the bombs hit Pearl Harbor, we all came together as a country. We knew we had been attacked in some level. Now, I understand this is a much more insidious type of attack that you don’t feel right away, but it is an attack at the fabric of democracy.

There’s no question about it. But why isn’t it that we didn’t respond the way we, you know, why wasn’t there, you know, George W Bush standing on the pile of rubble saying, “You know, you’ll hear from all of us?” I mean, our democracy was attacked.

James Clapper: Precisely because we didn’t have a pile of rubble. Well, things in the physical domain that you can see, feel, and touch, destroyed buildings, people killed, wounded, injured, that has a much more apparent immediate and indelible impact on people than something in the cyber domain, which is a bit more ethereal. And it’s hard to, you know, doesn’t have physical attributes, so it’s harder to get your arms around.

Rob Reiner: Well, for instance, you know, after 9/11, George W Bush was reluctant initially to have a 9/11 Commission because, obviously, from a political standpoint, you know, he might be blamed for not, you know, being more proactive or whatever.

But ultimately, he agreed to do it because the country’s security and the protection of our country was more important and trumped any kind of, you know, personal political gain that he had. But I don’t see that now. I don’t see that. And that’s what scares me.

John Brennan: You know, it really comes down, I think, to leadership. As long as the occupant of the Oval Office continues to refute the unanimous assessment of CIA, FBI, and NSA about what they did and continues to ignore, I think, the real challenges to our system of government, by what the Russians and others can do. It undercuts any effort to try to deal with this issue comprehensively, strategically, and thoughtfully.

And until that leadership that comes out of the White House is really going to say, “This is critically important for our future as a country and as a democracy,” it’s going to be a really tough road.

Rob Reiner: And why doesn’t he? Why isn’t that? I mean, I don’t, I don’t, I mean, I understand, you know, his feeling like maybe it’s going to delegitimize his election. And, you know, I don’t know. We don’t know where any of these investigations are going to go. But we’re talking about our country! Our democracy is at stake, here.

James Clapper: We briefed John and I.

Rob Reiner: You guys were there.

James Clapper: We briefed, when this happened the President-Elect at the time on January 6th. I think he viewed what we presented to him, which had very high confidence levels in what we presented him – which, by the way, a point I’ll make – had nothing to do with the dossier. We did not draw on the dossier.

The dossier, the infamous dossier was not a part of our intelligence community assessment.

Rob Reiner: Right.

James Clapper: What we did present, we had very, very high comments level in. And I believe that his first reaction to it was that this caused a question about the legitimacy of his election, which wasn’t the intent, at all. And, you know, that’s – I get it. That’s important. But the bigger issue, here and what is bothersome to me is the singular indifference to the threat posed by Russia.

Rob Reiner: To me, the way I see it, it goes beyond, you know, not pushing back. There’s been an active effort on the administration’s part to denigrate the intelligence community, to denigrate law enforcement and the Justice Department and to me, that’s the most disturbing. Because we’re talking about pillars. It’s one thing to say “Fake news, fake news!” and the media is, you know, destroyed or he tries to destroy the credibility of the media. But he’s trying to destroy the credibility of our security system!

James Clapper: Well, I have said consistently that in the case of the intelligence community, I believe the intelligence community as an institution will continue to convey truth to power. And whether the power accepts that truth or not, that’s another issue.

Now, I don’t know how long that can be sustained. I do worry about that. But I believe the fundamental instincts of the community are to do the right thing.

I do worry about the denigration of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the premier law enforcement organization on the planet, which is composed of 35,000 plus people. They’re humans. Do they make mistakes? Sure.

Does the Bureau make mistakes as an institution? Yes. But overall, when you think about what the Bureau does for this country, day in and day out, rank-and-file patriotic, dedicated professionals all over this country and all over the world keeping this nation safe and secure. And I wish we could keep that in perspective.

John Brennan: Yeah. The comments coming out of Mr Trump’s mouth have been very dispiriting to the professionals at CIA, FBI, NSA, and others who really dedicate their lives, at great sacrifice. And certainly very dispiriting to their families that make great sacrifices on behalf of their loved ones. As well as it sends, I think, a very bad message to the People of the United States, which is that these are the institutions that were established to protect our democracy, our security, our safety. It also sends a very bad signal to the world that if the person who holds the title of President denigrates, disparages the work and the professionalism and the integrity of the FBI and CIA and others, how then is the rest of the world going to look at those institutions? How are the CIA and FBI going to be able to work with counterparts around the globe on issues related to life and death matters, whether it be terrorism or proliferation or whatever, or interference in democratic systems? So the power of those words that have come out, I think, cannot be sort of understated. And I’m hoping we’re going to be able to get through this very, very, I think, very sad chapter of our history.

But I have great confidence that the professionals that Jim and I work with at the organizations are trying to do their very best to protect this country because that’s why they do what they do. They love this country. And irrespective of the denigration, irrespective of the lack of honesty and integrity of the people at the highest levels of government, the professionals and intelligence and law enforcement will do their work.

Rob Reiner: One of the great resources that we’ve been given is the wisdom of the founding fathers to create a Constitution upon which we can build this wonderful now 241-year experiment that we’ve had. And my fear is that those pillars of that institution are being torn away, the press, the law enforcement, intelligence, and we’re seeing no checks and balances coming from the Congress. That’s my fear. And the question I always have is, is our Constitution created strong enough to withstand this kind of assault?

James Clapper: I hope and pray that that Constitution, which has stood us in great stead for many, many years, will sustain us through this bad period. But in the end, it’s how we as a nation and how the nation’s leadership, and I mean by that both the Congress and the administration, the Executive Branch, how well they abide by it.

John Brennan: The President of the United States needs to speak with the greatest amount of precision, honesty, and integrity because he or she speaks to the world and he or she serves as a role model every moment of every day.

Rob Reiner: People who have held very high positions in the Intelligence Community, as you guys have obviously, don’t normally come out and speak out the way you have been speaking out. What is the reason you come out? Why do you do that?

James Clapper: For me, this has been very difficult. I’ve toiled in the trenches of intelligence for every president since then, including John F. Kennedy. My dad was an Army officer. I’ve been a political pointy in both Republican and Democratic administrations. So I’ve always been instinctively apolitical.

The Oath of Office you take, though, is not to a person. You don’t pledge loyalty to a person. You pledge loyalty to the Constitution.

And because our institutions that underpin this country are under assault, both from external sources – Russia – and internal sources, that I need to speak.

John Brennan: Both Jim and I and other senior intelligence officers love this country, and we have worked long and hard to do what we could in our own little individual ways to contribute to this country’s safety and security. I never thought I would witness what I’ve been seeing over the past year as far as what is happening to our government, the dishonesty, the lack of integrity, the lack of ethics.

We spent our lives looking at foreign governments and countries and analyzing them and seeing how corruption and incompetence and ineptness and lack of ethics undermined the ability of countries to thrive. And I never thought I would see some of those similar types of traits and attributes here.