New info on John Brennan’s single “source”…..source had no direct knowledge

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Brennan's informant is believed to be Oleg Smolenkov, who previously worked in the Russian Embassy in Washington and later as a government foreign policy adviser in Moscow, before moving back to the D.C. area in early 2017.

Brennan said his source could not be revealed because Putin might have him executed. However, reporters easily found Smolenkov living in a six-bedroom home in Stafford, Va., listed in his and his wife's real names.

It's not known if Smolenkov was paid for his information. The CIA and FBI declined to comment.

The highly classified version of the ICA did not fully identify Smolenkov, referring to him in "abbreviated" form. It described him as "an established source" but with only "secondhand access" to Kremlin information. That is, he was only repeating what an unnamed source had told him.

Then, in describing the "raw intelligence" he provided, the ICA conceded that it had no insight into Smolenkov's own source: "The exact circumstances in which the subsource obtained the information on Putin's plans were not explicitly clear."

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Explaining why NSA dissented from the key Putin conclusion, former NSA Director Adm. Mike Rogers argued the human source it was based on "did not have direct access" to insider information about Putin. Also, he added, "I didn't see multiple sources."

Foreign press outlets have noted that Smolenkov "would not have direct access to secret information at either the Russian Embassy in the U.S. or while working for the presidential administration in Moscow."

Yet Smolenkov was also Brennan's source for the ICA claim that Putin ordered allegedly hacked DNC material to be leaked to WikiLeaks.

"The established source with secondhand access provided us our only specific information on Putin's order to pass collected material to WikiLeaks," the highly classified version of the ICA stated.

He was also the source for "the reported role of the [Russian] Federal Security Service (FSB) hacking operations related to the U.S. election," the classified ICA said.

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