The January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment regarding imagined Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election set the stage for years of Russian-collusion smears, two congressional impeachments, multiple arrests, and a costly years-long investigation. It also helped further sour the relationship between the world's top two nuclear powers.

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard published on Wednesday an eye-opening House Intelligence Committee majority staff report, which confirms the ICA was a work of fiction drawn up by the Obama administration with the aim of kneecapping the democratically elected Republican president — a fiction that Democrats like Sen. Adam Schiff (Calif.) and their friends in the liberal media were more than happy to treat as gospel truth.

Gabbard told reporters during Wednesday's White House press briefing that she has referred the documents to the Department of Justice and FBI so that they can "investigate the criminal implications."

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Gabbard noted that the newly declassified report "exposes how the Obama Administration manufactured the January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment that they knew was false, promoting the LIE that Vladimir Putin and the Russian government helped President Trump win the 2016 election."

"In doing so, they conspired to subvert the will of the American people, working with their partners in the media to promote the lie, in order to undermine the legitimacy of President Trump, essentially enacting a years-long coup against him," the director added.

Gabbard certainly did not oversell the damning nature of the report and its findings.

After comparing the ICA analytic tradecraft against well-established intelligence community standards, spending over 2,300 hours reviewing the ICA and its source reports, and conducting numerous interviews, congressional investigators concluded that the Obama administration's assessment:

• Misrepresented reports that vociferous Trump critic and then-CIA Director John Brennan had ordered the publication of "as reliable, without mentioning their significant underlying flaws";
• "Ignored or selectively quoted reliable intelligence reports that challenged — and in some cases undermined — judgments that Putin sought to elect Trump";
• Violated analytic standards when citing British ex-spy Christopher Steele's dossier — a political opposition research report paid for in part by the Clinton campaign that Brennan included in the ICA despite high-level credibility concerns and internal opposition;
• Propped the narrative that Russian President Vladimir Putin "aspired" to help Trump win on "one scant, unclear, and unverifiable fragment of a sentence" from a "substandard report" that CIA officers initially omitted but were ordered by Brennan to include despite protest;
• Failed to consider alternative explanations of Putin's intentions indicated by intelligence that was actually reliable;
• Was written by five CIA analysts handpicked by Brennan; and
• Was rushed out by Brennan "in order to publish two weeks before President-elect Trump was sworn in."

The disparity between the raw intelligence available to the Obama administration at the time and what was ultimately presented in the ICA is jarring.

For instance, the 2017 assessment stated: "As early as February 2016, a Russian political expert possessed a plan that recommended engagement with [Trump's] team because of the prospects for improved U.S.-Russian relations, according to reporting from [redacted] government service."

'Critical information that undermined source credibility and veracity of key reporting was omitted from both the ICA text and the subsequent briefings.'

The ICA failed to mention that this supposed plan "was just an email with no date, no identified sender, no clear recipient, and no classification."

The relevant raw intelligence came with this context warning: "The CIA can neither independently vouch for [redacted] vetting or validation of the ultimate source nor the ultimate source's access to the reported information. The document contains no classification. The document did not carry a specific date or identify the originator."

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The Obama administration was evidently so desperate to paint Trump as Putin's man that they apparently neglected to mention that:

• A longtime Putin confidant told a sensitive contact both that he did not care who won the election and that "Russia was strategically placed to outmaneuver either one";
• Reliable evidenced showed key Putin advisers saw significant downsides to a Trump presidency; and
• Russia withheld compromising material about failed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton with the possible intent to exploit it once she was in office.

"Significant reports cited in support of judgments of Putin's intentions were not quoted accurately, were not quoted in context, or were selectively quoted to omit evidence that undermined ICA major judgments," the report said. "Moreover, critical information that undermined source credibility and veracity of key reporting was omitted from both the ICA text and the subsequent briefings of the document to the President-elect, the U.S. Congress, and the White House staff."

RELATED: From Obama to CNN: How the liberal media helped facilitate the 'treasonous conspiracy' about Russian collusion

Congressional investigators found some of the apparent lies of omission and flat-out lies in the ICA particularly egregious.

The report noted that in the case of the Steele dossier, the ICA "claimed the source 'collected this information on behalf of private clients' while failing to note those clients — the DNC and the Clinton campaign — were Candidate Trump's political opponents, information known to the FBI at the time."

In addition to this intentional omission "based on analysis of the testimony of Steele's FBI handler, Fusion GPS officials, and media exposures of the relationship," the ICA "also excluded that the political messaging firm that hired the dossier author, Fusion GPS, was also working on behalf of Russian interests to uncover information that was shared with the Kremlin, raising serious counterintelligence concerns over possible Russian influence on the dossier," the report said.

'To this day, our country is more polarized than ever before, and the Russia hoax played a role in that.'

In early December 2016, the FBI's director of counterintelligence and the DNI's national intelligence officer for Russia briefed Congress on Putin's supposed leak operations but made no mention of the foreign leader aspiring to elect Trump. However, Obama weighed in on Dec. 6, 2016, reportedly ordering a rewrite of the intelligence community's assessments.

A month later, Obama's underlings allegedly came up with a product Democrats would exploit nearly a decade.

Had Trump not retaken the White House, such findings may have never come to light, which might explain the fanatic support for Kamala Harris expressed by some of those implicated in the documents.

Gabbard, who underscored during the White House press conference the leading role former President Barack Obama took in this alleged "treasonous conspiracy," emphasized on X that "the Russia Hoax was a lie that was knowingly created by the Obama Administration to undermine the legitimacy and power of the duly elected President of the United States, Donald Trump."

Rep. Rick Crawford (R-Ark.), who is the current chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said in response to the report, "The Russia hoax will go down as one of the most troublesome events in U.S. history."

"A President of the United States was falsely accused, and a nation had to endure lies fabricated by rogue personnel within their own Intelligence Community," continued Crawford. "To this day, our country is more polarized than ever before, and the Russia hoax played a role in that."

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