Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard was asked in a recent interview about joining the military in the wake of 9/11 and her 2004 deployment to Iraq.

After reflecting on her friend's slaying by an IED and on the terrible prices paid by some of her other fellow service members, Gabbard told Miranda Devine, host of "Pod Force One," that their "memories, their service, their sacrifice, the sacrifices of their families motivates the work that we do every day to make sure that the president has the best, most objective, relevant intelligence so that he can make the best-informed decisions."

The DNI noted that she knows firsthand from the Iraq War "what the implications are when you have intelligence weaponized and in that case manufactured ... to start a regime-change war that I served in and that so many of my friends served in and too many of my friends and too many Americans lost their lives in."

'James Clapper was on the team that created that manufactured intelligence assessment that led to the Iraq War — about the WMDs.'

Gabbard identified one of the individuals responsible for the deceit that greased America's way into Iraq: former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper.

Before Clapper settled into former President Barack Obama's inner circle, he served as former President George W. Bush's director of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon unit responsible for analyzing spy-satellite photos as well as other technically gathered intelligence, including soil samples.

Bush established the Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction in 2004 to investigate the intelligence concerning weapons of mass destruction prior to the 2003 American invasion of Iraq.

The commission's March 2005 report to the former president stated:

On the brink of war, and in front of the whole world, the United States government asserted that Saddam Hussein had reconstituted his nuclear weapons program, had biological weapons and mobile biological weapon production facilities, and had stockpiled and was producing chemical weapons. All of this was based on the assessments of the U.S. Intelligence Community. And not one bit of it could be confirmed when the war was over.

When assigning blame, the report noted that it was partly a "failure on the part of those who collect intelligence — CIA's and the Defense Intelligence Agency's spies, the National Security Agency's eavesdroppers, and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency's imagery experts."

Clapper readily admitted in 2018, "My fingerprints are on the infamous national intelligence assessment of October 2002" that set the stage for the American invasion.

He told CNN's Dana Bash in 2018 that the intelligence community "built a case in our own minds, a house of cards, it turned out, that led us to the conclusion with pretty high confidence that they were there, and it turns out they weren’t."

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The commission's report noted that much of the intelligence that these agencies collected was "either worthless or misleading."

That misleading data set the stage for a 20-year conflict that claimed the lives of 4,599 American service members, over 3,650 American contractors, 15 Pentagon civilian personnel, 52,337 Iraqi national military and police, 324 allied troops, roughly 210,038 civilians, 282 journalists, and 64 humanitarian workers, according to the Watson School of International and Public Affairs.

'You see someone who has no problem whatsoever politicizing, and manufacturing, and weaponizing intelligence for a political outcome.'

"James Clapper was on the team that created that manufactured intelligence assessment that led to the Iraq War — about the WMDs," Gabbard told Devine. "He writes about it in his book, saying that he and his team of intelligence analysts created something that was not there."

"When you look at his actions then and you look at his actions in 2016 as Obama's director of national intelligence, you see someone who has no problem whatsoever politicizing, and manufacturing, and weaponizing intelligence for a political outcome," added Gabbard.

CIA Director John Ratcliffe recently declassified the appendix from the 2023 Durham report, which Senator Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) promptly released to the public.

The appendix revealed that Clapper was one of a handful of top Obama officials briefed at the White House on Aug. 3, 2016, regarding credible intelligence that the Clinton campaign planned to smear Trump, falsely link him to Russia, then have law enforcement and the intelligence community carry the ball down the field.

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Chip Somodevilla/Bloomberg/Alex Wong/Anadolu/Getty Images

Ratcliffe both named Clapper as one of the intelligence officials who "pushed the known fake Steele dossier into intelligence community assessments and as the basis for Crossfire Hurricane and all that," and accused the former DNI of manipulating intelligence "to get Trump."

Although cognizant of a possible Clinton plot to push the Russia hoax, Clapper published the 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment, which served to legitimize the false narrative.

According to the House Intelligence Committee majority staff report recently published by Gabbard, the ICA was a work of fiction comprising misquotes, unreliable reports, lies of omission, and straight-out falsehoods.

Clapper's fingerprints aren't just on the false pretext for a 20-year war and the Russia collusion hoax. He was one of the 51 signatories of the infamous Oct. 19, 2020, "intel" letter that suggested the news concerning the Hunter Biden laptop had "all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation."

After it became clear in recent weeks that the Trump administration is serious about bringing those involved in what Gabbard characterized as an alleged "treasonous conspiracy" to account, Clapper indicated that he would "lawyer up."

Blaze News was unable to reach Clapper for comment

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