House Intel chair accuses Obama of leading 'greatest perpetration of fraud' in history

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Rick Crawford on Wednesday accused former President Barack Obama of executing the "greatest perpetration of fraud against the American people in history," claiming the former president cannot "plead ignorance" in the case.

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard earlier Wednesday declassified and released a House Intelligence Committee report that alleges that an Obama-era intelligence assessment on Russian election meddling used the discredited Steele Dossier to underpin its conclusion that Russian President Vladimir Putin aspired to help Donald Trump win the 2016 election. 

The report rejects the conclusion that Russia interfered with the 2016 election in favor of Trump, stating some evidence indicated Russian President Vladimir Putin may have instead favored (or at least expected) a Hillary Clinton victory.

"This was about driving a narrative that was predetermined," Crawford said on the "Just The News, No Noise" TV show. "Whatever their motivation was, it was clearly nefarious. And there were a lot of people involved. It goes all the way up to President Obama. He can't plead ignorance. He can't, you know, play the plausible deniability card. He was intimately involved in this and authorized it."

Crawford, who was one of the champions of getting the report publicly released, said a lot of Obama's allies were also involved in the decade-long scheme and dismissed warnings that things like the Steele Dossier could be fabricated. 

Other takeaways from the report include allegations that Putin's motive for interfering in the election was chaos, and not to help a specific candidate, and that the CIA failed to properly vet its sources and confirm the reliability of its sources.

"This is possibly one of the greatest perpetrations of fraud against the American people in history," Crawford said. "Here is the overriding concern that I have, and have had for a number of years ... that is the lack of analytic integrity that continues to exist and persist throughout the intelligence community (IC), and really it stems from the CIA. 

"But because the CIA is the preeminent agency within the IC writ large, it has percolated out over other agencies, because they sort of set the tone," he continued. "This has, rather than, you know, becoming an anomaly type thing. It's become the norm. And so what we can allow is for political bias to be introduced in the analytic process. And not only was political bias introduced in the analytic process, it was on steroids."

The chairman also confirmed the sequence of events leading to the assertion that Russia was meddling in the election. In September 2016, the intelligence committee agreed Russia does not have a preference in the election, which they told then-President Obama in December, who then allegedly tried to create a different conclusion.

"I think it was on January 6 of 2017, that's when things really started to accelerate with regard to what the Deep State was engaged in," he said. "I say deep state because, before I got on the Intelligence Committee, I was not inclined to entertain the notion of this deep state until I saw it for myself.

"I can tell you that there are people who think that they run the government, and they do it without any accountability and without any election," he added. "And they think that they're the ones that run the show and that just can't happen."

Misty Severi is a news reporter for Just The News. You can follow her on X for more coverage.