This week Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe declassified a handwritten memo of former CIA Director John Brennan which revealed he had briefed President Barack Obama about Hillary Clinton’s “plot to ‘stir up’ a scandal to tie Trump to Russian in order to distract from her email scandal ahead of the 2016 election” reported The Gateway Pundit.

In a letter to Senator Lindsey Graham, Ratcliffe wrote of the matter, “In late July 2016, US intelligence agencies obtained insight into Russian intelligence analysis alleging that US Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton had approved a campaign plan to stir up a scandal against US Presidential candidate Donald Trump by tying him to Putin and the Russians’ hacking of the DNC. The IC does not know the accuracy of this allegation of the extent to which the Russian intelligence analysis may reflect exaggerations or fabrication.”

The Gateway Pundit reminds us of an article from June 25, 2018, published by Yahoo News, which explained President Obama’s secret 2016 White House meetings:

For the usual interagency sessions, principals and deputies could bring staffers. Not this time. “There were no plus ones,” an attendee recalled. When the subject of a principals or deputies meeting was a national security matter, the gathering was often held in the Situation Room of the White House. The in-house video feed of the Sit Room – without audio – would be available to national security officials at the White House and elsewhere, and these officials could at least see that a meeting was in progress and who was attending.

For the meetings related to the Russian hack, Susan Rice, Obama’s national security adviser, ordered the video feed turned off. She did not want others in the national security establishment to know what was underway, fearing leaks from within the bureaucracy.

White House officials who were absent from the meetings were not told what was being discussed. This even included other NSC staffers – some of whom bristled at being shut out. Often the intelligence material covered in these meetings was not placed in the President’s Daily Brief, the top-secret document presented to the president every morning. Too many people had access to the PDB. “The opsec on this” – the operational security – “was tight as it could be,” one White House official later said.

Gateway Pundit explains the Obama White House’s secret 2016 meetings relating to the Russia investigation is odd because “crooked John Kerry from the State Department was invited but good guy Admiral Mike Rogers from the NSA was excluded. Susan Rice had the video cut off so the NSA could not see what was being discussed.”