No. of Recommendations: 3
Here's what I think happened. So the original PDB gets spiked because it concluded The Wrong Thing. Russia evidently DID hack into Illinois' voter database, but it didn't matter: in 2016 Hillary! won the state by 16 points, the same margin that Obama had in 2012. (for the record Biden won it by 17 in 2020).
Let's apply the maximum fairness to Barack Obama:
The declassified meeting record, obtained by Fox News Digital, revealed that principals "agreed to recommend sanctioning of certain members of the Russian military intelligence and foreign intelligence chains of command responsible for cyber operations as a response to cyber activity that attempted to influence or interfere with U.S. elections, if such activity meets the requirements" from an executive order that demanded the blocking of property belonging to people engaged in cyber activities.
After the meeting, according to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, Clapper’s executive assistant emailed intelligence community leaders tasking them to create a new intelligence community assessment "per the president’s request," that detailed the "tools Moscow used and actions it took to influence the 2016 election."
He probably told his henchmen to Send Russia A Message for hacking into Illinois. But the henchmen (Clapper, Brennan, Comey) took it as an opportunity to de-rail Trump's Presidency, if not eliminate it entirely.
That's the maximally fair explanation. The not-so-fair explanation is different.
