The origin of the Trump-Russia collusion lie (07-03-2025--Hour1)

[00:00:04] What's going on? Thank you so much for listening to this podcast. It is heard live every day from noon to 3 on WBT Radio in Charlotte. And if you want exclusive content like invitations to events, the weekly live stream, my daily show prep with all the links, become a patron, go to thepetekalendershow.com. Make sure you hit the subscribe button, get every episode for free, right to your smartphone or tablet. And again, thank you so much for your support.

[00:00:29] Yeah, so I will not be here tomorrow. It'll be a best of program here on WBT. Next week, I am also not here. So from a programming standpoint, we I mean, there will be a fill in host. I don't know. Do we know? I know he's I don't know who's filling. Do you guys know? Chad Adams? Chad Adams will be filling in for me. If you're listening to the podcast. Thanks a lot for that. I appreciate it. But we will also be posting the podcast.

[00:00:58] as well. So all of that will remain the same. It's just I won't be here for it. So I want to take you back to December 6th. 2016. All right. So Donald Trump had beaten Hillary Clinton. Right. Oh, the hilarity of the media meltdown. Half the country in utter disbelief. People trying to figure out how could this have happened? Right.

[00:01:29] December 6th. That is also the date when president at the time, Barack Obama, also suffering from the disbelief that Donald Trump had won. Ordered an intelligence community assessment or what's called an ICA.

[00:01:50] He ordered the assessment as to whether or not Donald Trump was helped along in his election by Vladimir Putin and Russia. December 6th. They put a date for this to be completed December 20th.

[00:02:13] So two weeks. They had to put together this ICA, which these ICAs take longer than two weeks to put together, particularly if it's of a, you know, politically charged nature. So who would then be in charge of of doing the ICA? Well, you got a bunch of career, you know, spies and analysts and experts in Russia and all of this other stuff.

[00:02:40] That's how you would normally do it. But in this case, things went a little differently. And now we know what all transpired because the new director of the CIA, now that Trump has returned to office, John Ratcliffe. And he commissioned a what's called a tradecraft review. To look at how the ICA.

[00:03:09] Report was developed in these two weeks, what the final product was and all of that. And so this review of the ICA has now been completed. And the New York Post's Miranda Devine got the exclusive. On the report, it is now public. And she got an interview with Ratcliffe.

[00:03:30] And according to the report, the administration, the Obama administration spy agencies assessment that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election to help Donald Trump was deliberately corrupted. By then CIA director John Brennan. FBI director James Comey. And director of national intelligence, James Clapper.

[00:03:58] Who could have seen this coming? Man, what a shock. Do you even know who these guys are? Right. This is not new information, I think, to a lot of people who listen to talk radio. Conservatives read conservative media. This has been very obvious from the very beginning. I've been talking about it for almost a decade now.

[00:04:26] They were, but now we have all of the review, all the receipts, all the emails. These three guys were excessively involved in its drafting and rushed its completion. So over the two weeks. In a chaotic, atypical and markedly unconventional process that raised questions of a potential political motive. No. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:04:56] Furthermore, Brennan's decision to include the discredited Steele dossier over the objections of the CIA's most senior Russia experts undermined the credibility of the entire ICA itself. Brennan forced the Steele dossier into this assessment. Why is the assessment important? It was then leaked.

[00:05:24] In fact, it was leaked before it was even done. How does that happen? Rasmussen, I just saw this on Twitter. Let me see here. Pull it up. Rasmussen reports, or yeah, the polling outfit. December 2019, they published this survey. It was done in December of 2019.

[00:05:55] What type of disciplinary action should be taken against senior federal law enforcement officials if they are found guilty of breaking the law to prevent a Trump presidency? 43% say jailed. 22% said fired. 15% said reprimanded. 11% said no action. And 9% were unsure.

[00:06:20] But the number one response is to jail them if they are found guilty of breaking law to prevent a Trump presidency. The Lessons Learned review, this tradecraft review that was commissioned by the CIA director John Ratcliffe back in May,

[00:06:46] It details how on December 6th, which was six weeks before Obama was out of office, he ordered the assessment, which concluded, the original assessment concluded that Russian President Vladimir Putin aspired to help Trump win the election. That was their conclusion. That was their conclusion in this ICA.

[00:07:10] That was rushed and was manipulated and corrupted by Clapper, Comey, and Brennan. It also questioned the exclusion of key intelligence agencies. This review did. Key intel agencies were not part of this ICA, which was a break from protocol.

[00:07:31] The review also said that media leaks may have influenced analysts to conform to a false narrative of Trump-Russia collusion. Because the analysts were looking at the ICA after they had already seen reports in the New York Times and the Washington Post that there was a consensus already in the intelligence community.

[00:07:57] So they were aware, the analysts were aware that that reporting was out there. They knew that there was this supposed consensus that Russia helped Trump. And then they started their review of the ICA. Also, the rushed timeline to publish both classified and unclassified versions before the presidential transition raised questions about a potential political motive behind the White House tasking and timeline.

[00:08:26] The review found that Brennan directed the compilation of the ICA and that his, Comey's, and Clapper's direct engagement in the ICA's development was highly unusual in both scope and intensity and risked stifling analytic debate.

[00:08:46] Miranda Devine goes on to say that Brennan handpicked the CIA analysts who would compile the ICA and he only involved the ODNI, the CIA, the FBI, and the NSA. He cut out of the mix 13 of the 17 intelligence agencies. So he picked the people and he kept the group small and tight.

[00:09:13] He also forced the inclusion of the discredited Steele dossier despite objections of the dossier's authors and the objections of senior CIA Russia experts. These people would know and did know. They looked at this and they were like, this is trash. And he's like, we're putting it in. What to do now?

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[00:11:07] So you can now text all of your passwords, social security numbers to me directly via the text line. If you don't like the way I sound on the radio when I give my personal information. No, I'm kidding. Don't text that stuff. But you can comment on the text line. And you can also call 704-570-1110. And you can also hit me up on Twitter, at Pete Kaliner. And that is K-A-L-I-N-E-R. So the New York Post with the exclusive.

[00:11:36] Yesterday this came out. This is the tradecraft review of the Intelligence Community Assessment, the ICA, that was developed in about two weeks, right as Obama was leaving. He had Clapper, Comey, and Brennan put this thing together,

[00:11:58] which would then tell all of America that Donald Trump was a puppet of the Russian president, Vladimir Putin. There is a key component to this, which is mentioned at the very end of this very lengthy article by Miranda Devine, which I think is really important that I hadn't even thought of. All these years later, I never thought of this. But John Ratcliffe, the current CIA chief,

[00:12:26] He said that the bogus ICA had risked dire national security consequences by further aggravating the already tense relationship with Russia. Quote, The most destructive thing you can do with intelligence is to weaponize it for one party's political gain against another, to blame an admitted adversary for something they did not do. It was like pouring gasoline on the fire

[00:12:55] for all of the bad things Vladimir Putin has done and is capable of doing. They didn't need to exaggerate it or run a fake story in 2017. And then again in 2020 with the Hunter Biden laptop claiming that Russia influenced the outcome on that story too. Right? The bogus ICA is what launched the false narrative of Trump as a Russian agent.

[00:13:21] And at the very least, according to Ratcliffe, Brennan, Clapper, and Comey should be pariahs. These guys should not have a voice. They shouldn't be able to influence the American people. Will they actually pay any price for this? Will they actually lose their talking head gigs at CNN and MSNBC? They should. Right? In a sane and just world, they should.

[00:13:50] They would if those outlets had any decency or respect for themselves. So this... Hang on a second. This is also Ratcliffe earlier in this story. He says, This was... The Obama administration, Comey, Clapper, Brennan. This was basically, We're going to create this ICA and we're going to put sort of this seal of approval,

[00:14:18] the credibility that comes with the institutional cachet, right? Of an IC assessment. And we're going to do it in a way that nobody can question it. So they stamp it as Russian collusion and then they classified it so that nobody could see it. This led to the Mueller probe, the Mueller inquiry, right? Special Counsel Robert Mueller, which concluded after two years that there was no Trump-Russia collusion.

[00:14:48] The fact that it took two years for them to fully track all of this stuff down is also scandalous when you now know what the process was. That these three guys corrupted the process with the ICA. That would have been determined immediately. It should have been determined immediately. But for two years, right? It keeps Trump on the defensive.

[00:15:16] It hamstrings his administration. It creates all this chaos. It gives all of the fodder to his political foes. Oh, he's just, you know, Putin's lapdog and all of this. It put the seal of approval of the intelligence community that Russia was helping Trump and that the Steele dossier was the scandal of our lifetime. It ate up the first two years of Trump's first term, said Radcliffe.

[00:15:46] And before work even began on the ICA, during this compressed two-week timeline, even before they started work, there were media leaks suggesting that the intel community had already reached definitive conclusions. Who would have done that? Obviously somebody who knows that the ICA had been ordered.

[00:16:15] So Obama, Brennan, Comey, or Clapper, or maybe all of the above. They leak it. And that risked creating a thing called anchoring. The term anchoring refers to a cognitive bias that occurs in psychology, and it suggests that the media leaks may have influenced the analysts working on the ICA to shape their findings

[00:16:44] to conform with the leaked narrative rather than conducting an objective analysis, right? Because you walk in the door ready to start your work, and you've already seen the news reports that the intel community had reached definitive conclusions. So now you're going to approach it like, well, other agencies have already found this. Like, that becomes sort of your inherent bias right out of the gate.

[00:17:11] So December 6th, 2016, that was the day that Obama commissioned the ICA. Three days later, the Washington Post and the New York Times reported that the IC had, quote, concluded with high confidence that Russia had intervened specifically to help Trump win the election. The Washington Post had cited unnamed U.S. officials describing this as the IC's, intelligence community's, consensus view.

[00:17:42] And then there's the timeline, the highly compressed timeline. This was not typical for a formal IC assessment. These things are complex. They take months to prepare, especially assessments of such length and political sensitivity, according to this latest review of the ICA, which goes on to say, quote, CIA's primary authors had less than one week to draft the assessment

[00:18:10] and less than two days to formally coordinate with its IC peers before it entered the formal review process at CIA on December 20th. So they rushed the thing through. Remember also, this is right up against Christmas. It's during a transition. Obama has lost, leaving the White House. Trump is coming in. Meanwhile, Comey's running around, right, with his,

[00:18:39] with Peter Strzok and Andy McCabe, Lisa Page, right? And they're in there trying to get Michael Flynn, General Flynn, right? They're going after him. They go into his office and all of this, right? Like, all of this stuff is happening all at the same time. And by the way, I went and looked it up too. You know when the date was for Jim Comey's first meeting with Trump where he told him about the Steele dossier and then immediately leaked it to the press so they could run the Steele dossier?

[00:19:10] That was on January 6th, 2017. Another famous date of insurrections. Also, this ICA, they were only allowed to have a hard copy. So they printed it. And that was it. There was no digital copy of it where people could pass it around, which means that they had to hand carry this report, this ICA. They had to,

[00:19:38] if they were going to go work on it, they had to deliver copies in person the week before Christmas when people are on vacation, offices are closed. Yeah. Brennan, Comey, Clapper. Again, Rasmussen, 43% of Americans say they should be jailed. Here's a great idea. How about making an escape to a really special and secluded getaway in western North Carolina just a quick drive up the mountain?

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[00:21:05] 828-367-7068. Or check out all there is to offer at cabinsofashville.com and make memories that'll last a lifetime. Let's head over to the text line driven by Liberty Buick GMC. This is from, who is this from? Danny, who says, Brennan, Clapper, excuse me, Brennan, Clapper, and Comey should not just be pariahs, they should spend the remainder of their lives in federal prison.

[00:21:35] What they did not only violated the oath of office and interfered with the election process, it created a higher level of danger for the entire country by dragging Russia into something that they had nothing to do with. That was from Danny, I think. Yes. But, but, but, I'm sorry, I'm trying to, mm-hmm. Trump and the American people should file a class action lawsuit against Obama, Comey, Clapper, and Brennan.

[00:22:04] That is from Ralph and, do, do, do, do, do. Nick, are you responding to these people on the, on the text line? Oh, okay. You're trying to get their info? Like their social security number and, yeah, okay. Here's one. You've mentioned this before, sorry, I'm still, I'm still learning the new, uh, platform. So,

[00:22:34] uh, so I don't know if I have a name yet for this one. It's just, I'll just call it a 704 number. Um, you've mentioned this before, but I'm still amazed there was a period of time that the FBI knew that Hunter Biden's laptop was legit, the Steele dossier was fake, and that Trump did not collude with Russia all at the same time. And they chose to lie to everyone about all three. Yeah. All three.

[00:23:04] And no, I'm not going to back, Randy, I'm not backing Pam Warner for Secretary of Transportation. Sorry. That's, I don't know where this campaign began, but it ends here. She's not going to be DOT secretary. Um, back to the, uh, New York Post report. Highly recommend. It's a very lengthy read. Uh, it'll take you like, uh, 20 minutes. It's, it's newyorkpost.com. Obama's Trump-Russia collusion report was corrupt from the start is the headline.

[00:23:34] So, the direct engagement of Brennan, Comey, and Clapper in the development of this intelligence community assessment or the ICA was, according to this review, quote, highly unusual in both scope and intensity and it likely influenced participants. Right, because when the boss is directing you to do stuff and you see

[00:24:04] the media is reporting that this is the, this is the consensus view inside the intelligence community, right, you're being led to a particular conclusion from the beginning. One CIA analytic manager involved in the process said of other analytic managers that they opted out. They, they did not join. They opted out due to the politically charged

[00:24:34] environment and the atypical prominence of agency leadership in the process. So, the very fact that Comey, Brennan, and Clapper were so, you know, intimately involved in the ICA prompted analytic managers to say, I'm not touching this. They knew what was up. And nine years later, if this review hadn't been done, we would not have known that.

[00:25:05] So, what about those guys and gals? Like, who are they? Like, they obviously sniffed it out right at the beginning and they were like, I don't want to touch this thing. And they never blew the whistle? Despite the fact that the ICA authors and multiple senior CIA managers, including the two senior leaders of the CIA mission center responsible for Russia, okay, so the ICA authors

[00:25:34] and the ICA. They said it did not meet even the most basic tradecraft standards. What else here? Let me skip ahead. Brennan, according to the review, showed a preference for narrative consistency over analytical soundness.

[00:26:04] And why would that be important? Well, if you're trying to sell a story to the American public, you want it to be very, very easy to remember short slogan that, you know, Trump is an asset of Russia. Putin wanted Trump to win. Putin helped Trump win. Trump is a spy for Russia. Whatever. Like, these are the slogans that help you sell this

[00:26:34] narrative, this larger narrative. The ICA authors first learned of the Steele dossier and the FBI's insistence that the Steele dossier be included in the ICA. The authors of the ICA first learned of the dossier and learned of the FBI's insistence on December 20th, the day that this thing was done. Like, that day. The same day that

[00:27:03] the largely coordinated draft was entering into the review process at the CIA. Remember, the FBI also lied on their FISA application to get the wiretapping done, right? They lied on the FISA application about Carter Page, the lawyer. Remember? And he's now back at work. He's practicing law again. Suffered like, I think he got like a one-year

[00:27:32] suspension for his law license. But he lied saying that Carter Page had no contacts or no relationship with the CIA when, in fact, he knew that Carter Page would talk to the CIA. Every time Carter Page, one of the guys, an advisor for Trump, anytime Carter Page went over to Russia to do any business, he would always come back and brief the CIA.

[00:28:02] And the FBI asked about that, and the CIA said, yes, we have a relationship with him. And then the FBI lawyer guy lied about it to the court in order to get the wiretaps. FBI leadership made it clear that their participation in the ICA process hinged on the Steele dossier being included in the ICA. And over the next few days, the FBI

[00:28:32] repeatedly pushed to weave references to it throughout the main body of the assessment. That's Comey. That's McCabe. That's Peter Strzok. The review that was just completed and now released is critical of the decision by Brennan and Clapper and Comey to marginalize the National Intelligence Council or the NIC because that's a departure, significant

[00:29:02] departure, from standard procedures for all formal ICAs. The NIC did not receive or even see the final draft until just hours before the ICA was due to be published. Typically, the National Intelligence Council maintains control over drafting assignments, coordination, and review processes. And they were cut out.

[00:29:30] So these safeguards, if you think of them like that, maybe they aren't really in practice, but the idea is that you get all of these different agencies to look at this in order to suss out bad intel and make it as firm as possible, as truthful as possible. to convey the information that you know. And they were cut out until the day of, so they couldn't do their

[00:30:00] job, basically. All of these actions point in one direction, which is corrupt manipulation. All right, if you're listening to this show, you know I try to keep up with all sorts of current events, and I know you do too, and you've probably heard me say, get your news from multiple sources. Why? Well, because it's how you detect media bias, which is why I've been so impressed with Ground News. It's an app, and it's a website, and it combines news from around the world in one place, so you can compare coverage

[00:30:29] and verify information. You can check it out at check.ground.news slash Pete. I put the link in the podcast description too. I started using Ground News a few months ago, and more recently chose to work with them as an affiliate because it lets me see clearly how stories get covered, and by whom. The Blind Spot feature shows you which stories get ignored by the left and the right. See for yourself. Check.ground.news slash Pete. Subscribe through that link, and

[00:30:59] you'll get 15% off any subscription. I use the Vantage plan to get unlimited access to every feature. Your subscription then not only helps my podcast, but it also supports Ground News as they make the media landscape more transparent. Timoteo writes on Twitter, this is worse than Watergate. I concur. I concur. This is worse than Watergate. Far worse. It weaponized the intelligence agencies against

[00:31:29] the incoming president and his administration, and it built this entire narrative of Russian collusion, which, if you're the Russians, you know this is a lie, and so you're like, why are the intel agencies pushing this stuff? Why are they saying this stuff? It's like, oh, they're trying to take out Trump. What do you think that does then to that relationship when they know that Trump is being targeted by the intel agencies?

[00:32:01] Bain, welcome to the program. What's going on, Bain? Hey, man. I need you to walk me through this again. What happened on December 6th? December 6th, 2016, that's when Barack Obama ordered the ICA, the Intelligence Community Assessment. That's when he ordered it to be done. And then in two weeks, on the 20th of December, that's when the ICA was finished,

[00:32:29] and then you go to January 6th, so another two weeks after Christmas and New Year's and January 6th arrives, and that's when Comey has the meeting with Trump and tells him, hey, there's this Steele dossier thing that's out there. I'm just going to let you know. Meanwhile, the Steele dossier had been leaked to all of these various news organizations, and they were waiting to find a way to publish it because they couldn't just use it because it was, you know, they couldn't confirm its veracity because it

[00:32:59] wasn't true. And so Comey's meeting then gets leaked, and then the media gets to report that Comey was in this meeting to tell Trump about this thing that's out there that could hurt him or embarrass him, and, oh, by the way, here is that very thing that could hurt and embarrass him, and then the Daily Beast published it in full. Right. And this is where I get lost in the weeds. So we go back to the initiating on December 6th for the intelligence community.

[00:33:29] But didn't you say, or the article said, that really there was no intelligence community because a large portion of the X number of agencies were excluded. Correct. That's huge to me. Yeah. It's like a sin of omission. Correct. Yeah, it was designed to people. Yeah, it was designed, the process was designed to get the narrative out there. That was the point. And call it an ICA, which people who

[00:33:58] cover this, you know, as their beat, they know what an ICA is, and that has the credibility and respectability of an entire intelligence community assessment, right? That's why they went this route. But then they manipulated it, they corrupted it, and they kept 14 of the 17 intel agencies out of the mix, or 13 of the 17 out of the mix. And that's eerily similar to the district, federal district courts, where all of these holdups

[00:34:28] of Trump has come through. It's really just a handful. And so that seems what it is. We're going to have an umbrella as we're seeking consensus we're really not, but the people that aren't involved willfully or purposely, they're not speaking up too. Not that they hold the same level of responsibility for not speaking up, but I'm still shocked at that. There's no such thing as an intelligence community. The very title is a misnomer. Because it

[00:34:58] wasn't. Right, because it was right. The ICA was anything but. And in fact, they had already leaked this lie that there was a consensus that Russia had aspired to help Trump win. They had already put that into the media at the very beginning of the, like, on December 9th. Two news stories appear, Washington Post, New York Times, saying that there's already a definitive conclusion. So yeah, it was a rigged system the entire time. Right.

[00:35:28] I just, I just, that's the genesis, that's the point of departure. And who did they, and then I know you run out of time, who did they ultimately answer to? Did Obama come up with this idea or did the triumph for the three guys? They, well, he ordered it, but yeah, was it his idea or was it their idea and they came to Obama and said, hey, we, you know, we need to do an ICA and Obama would have known what that meant and so they just, like, got him to sign off on it

[00:35:57] and he didn't know what they were doing? I don't know. I'd like to, That's a big point too. Yeah. Yeah, because they could have deceived him as well, right? They could have deceived him. I don't know what to believe on that front though. No, but that, that's a huge, we got to take it, you got to trace it back and if he just says, I don't know, yeah, but it could have been his idea and he says, how can we do this? Right. Or did they show up? Here's an idea. Right. He could have said, this is like, you know,

[00:36:27] I'm hearing all this stuff about Trump and Russia collusion and all of this stuff, right? That's quite possible. The other possibility is that one of them or all three of them came in with some of this quote unquote evidence, right? And they said, hey, you know, we have to take a look at this stuff because we have, you know, clear signs, there's clear evidence, we have this dossier and, you know, maybe they didn't show it to him, but they could have obviously, you know, told him about these things and gotten him to sign off on it thinking that, oh my gosh, we've just elected

[00:36:56] a Putin puppet. So, yeah, I think the investigation does not end here. Bain, I appreciate the call, man. Have a great weekend. Thank you. All right, buddy. You too. Yeah. Happy Independence Day to Bain. We'll pick this up after the news. All right, that'll do it for this episode. Thank you so much for listening. I could not do the show without your support and the support of the businesses that advertise on the podcast. So if you'd like, please support them too. And tell them you heard it here. You can also become a patron at my Patreon page

[00:37:26] or go to thepetecalendorshow.com. Again, thank you so much for listening and don't break anything while I'm gone.