Evelyn Farkas, the former Obama administration official who dropped a bombshell on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” earlier this month, is now furiously back-peddling. Farkas, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense under Obama, seemed to admit during that March 2 appearance that her colleagues had gathered intelligence on the Trump campaign’s alleged ties to Russia before Donald Trump took office and then tried to hide the sources of that intelligence from the incoming administration.
“I was urging my former colleagues and, frankly speaking, the people on the Hill, it was more actually aimed at telling the Hill people, get as much information as you can, get as much intelligence as you can, before President Obama leaves the administration,” said Farkas.
“I had a fear that somehow that information would disappear with the senior [Obama] people who left, so it would be hidden away in the bureaucracy,” she said, adding that if “the Trump folks” found out how they knew what they knew, “they would try to compromise those sources and methods, meaning we would no longer have access to that intelligence.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gapRNpEjXUo
On NBC News yesterday, she claimed that she had been misunderstood, telling the Squawk Box panel that she was only explaining “why people might be motivated to do that.”
During a later appearance on MSNBC Thursday afternoon, Farkas actually claimed that she was the victim of a “dark campaign of fake news.”
Farkas, now an NBC News national security analyst, whined to anchor Kate Snow:
And on the dark campaign of fake news, you know, that’s still ongoing. We see even someone like myself get swept up in all of this. You know, when people like me are speaking on behalf of process, people spin to it suit their needs. And I think it may be that the Russians are behind even such fake news today.
(I ran the story here at PJ Media earlier this week, and can assure Ms. Farkas that I am not a Russian “botnet” nor am I being paid by the Russians to spread “fake news.”)
Anchor Kate Snow ran a clip of Spicer telling reporters yesterday:
Obama’s Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense that is out there, Evelyn Farkas, she made it clear that it was their goal to spread this information around, that they went around and did this. And she said, quote, “That’s why there are so many leaks.” They have admitted on the record that this was their goal, to leak stuff. And they – literally she said on the record, “Trump’s team.” There are serious questions out there about what happened and why and who did it.
Farkas denied her own words, calling the reaction to them a “total distortion.”
So there’s a total distortion of what I said and what I was talking about. I was talking about the fact that I was – I was outside of government, I no access to intelligence on this whatsoever – but I was concerned because I knew how the Russians operate and I was reading these reports about them hacking into the elections and then giving information to Wikipedia [sic] and that Trump people, Trump team people, were going to Moscow. And you know, there was a lot of reporting on this.
https://youtu.be/Q8xyL8sBngI
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