NEW YORK, July 2. /TASS/. At the end of his term, the 44th US President Barack Obama and senior intelligence officials decided to publish a report about alleged Russian interference into the US election and thus frame Donald Trump during his first presidential term, CIA Director John Ratcliffe said.
"This was Obama, [then FBI Director James] Comey, [then-Director of National Intelligence James] Clapper and [then-CIA Director John] Brennan deciding ‘We’re going to screw Trump,’" Ratcliffe told the New York Post in an interview.
According to the US official, the goal was to create a report that nobody could question, so they "stamped it as Russian collusion and then classified it so nobody could see it."
"It [the report] put the seal of approval of the intelligence community that Russia was helping Trump <…>. It ate up the first two years of his [Trump’s first] presidency," the CIA chief said.
"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 didn’t do. It was like pouring gasoline on the fire," he added.
The Mueller probe
On April 18, 2019, the US Department of Justice released a report on the results of the investigation by Special Counsel of the US Department of Justice Robert Muller, which began in 2016 and took almost two years. The Special Adviser claimed that Russia tried to influence the course of the presidential election campaign in the United States in 2016. At the same time, he admitted that the investigation did not reveal Trump's collusion with Russia.
Trump and his assistants repeatedly rejected suspicions of any illegal contacts with Russian officials during the election campaign. Moscow also repeatedly rejected allegations of attempts to influence the course of elections in the United States.