WITCH HUNTS ARE A FUNCTION OF WITCHES:

In all of Attorney General Barr's statements--both written and verbal--during his release of the Mueller report, he studiously avoided mentioning the fact that Russian interference was designed to support Trump. In addition, both Barr and Trump's enablers in the media have suggested that the assessment was the result of bias against the president and that the Steele dossier was incorporated into its findings. The goal has been to lay all of those failures at the feet of Brennan and claim that his intentions were to take down Donald Trump.

On Tuesday, the Senate Intelligence Committee released the fourth volume of their bipartisan investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. This one focused on the intelligence community assessment, dropping a bombshell on every one of those accusations. Here are some of the key findings:

* The Committee found the ICA presents a coherent and well-constructed intelligence basis for the case of unprecedented Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

* In all the interviews of those who drafted and prepared the ICA, the Committee heard consistently that analysts were under no politically motivated pressure to reach specific conclusions.

* The Committee found that the ICA provides a proper representation of the intelligence collected by CIA, NSA, and FBI on Russian interference in 2016, and this body of evidence supports the substance and judgments of the ICA.

* The Committee found that the information provided by Christopher Steele to FBI was not used in the body of the ICA or to support any of its analytic judgments. However, a summary of this material was included in Annex A as a compromise to FBI's insistence that the information was responsive to the presidential tasking.

It is hard to imagine a more thorough debunking of the insinuations we've heard from Barr and Trump's media enablers. The Republican Senators who signed on to this report include Richard Burr, James Risch, Marco Rubio, Susan Collins, Roy Blunt, Tom Cotton, John Cornyn, and Ben Sasse, making claims that it was a partisan smear job completely untenable.

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