A bombshell House Intelligence Committee (HPSCI) Majority Staff Report recently released by Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Tulsi Gabbard explains in detail how the rules for drafting intelligence assessments were deliberately ignored to produce a highly politicized Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) in early January 2017, designed to sabotage the first Trump administration.
Worried about the House report’s clarity and persuasiveness, former Obama officials, former intelligence officials, congressional Democrats, and liberal journalists are desperately trying to discredit this report.
President Obama ordered the ICA, titled “Russia’s Influence Campaign Targeting the 2016 Presidential Election,” during a December 9, 2016, meeting with DNI James Clapper, CIA Director John Brennan, National Security Adviser Susan Rice, Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe, and others. The ICA was issued less than a month later, on January 6, 2017.
Because ICAs are high-profile analyses of significant national security issues that are supposed to reflect the views of all 17 U.S. intelligence agencies, they usually take many months – often over a year – to complete. For this reason, the speed with which this ICA was issued sparked immediate controversy.
The Intelligence Community’s tradecraft standards are guidelines taught to all U.S. intelligence analysts to ensure that their analysis reflects analytic rigor and excellence. The House report explains how these standards were set aside to produce this assessment in less than a month and ensure that it had one preordained conclusion: that Russian President Vladimir Putin wanted Trump to win the 2016 election and that Russia meddled in the election to help Trump win.
Which Intelligence Analysis Rules Were Broken?
The House report found significant violations of the following intelligence tradecraft standards:
Dishonest Arguments to Discredit the House Report
To distract from the House report’s findings, some on the left, especially former intelligence officials and the liberal media, have made several dishonest arguments to discredit it.
The most frequently heard argument is that a unanimous bipartisan April 2020 Senate Intelligence Committee report on the Russia collusion hoax and the ICA is more reliable because the ICA’s authors and others involved in its production told Senate investigators that tradecraft rules were followed and there was no political pressure on them to reach specific conclusions. Defenders of the ICA have also asserted that the Senate report is more credible because now-Secretary of State Marco Rubio was the Senate Intelligence Committee chairman when this report was issued.
These criticisms are misleading and false.
First, it was not a surprise that the authors of the ICA, who were hand-picked by former CIA Director Brennan, would defend their work as objective and nonpolitical. However, it is unclear whether other intelligence officers interviewed by the committee’s staff spoke freely and without fear of retaliation.
As I explained in my July 25, 2025 American Greatness article on the House report, the report’s authors told me they believed their report was more credible than a bipartisan report because some intelligence officers would have refused to speak with members of a bipartisan congressional investigation team due to concerns that Democratic members of such a team would leak their cooperation to their managers, who would retaliate against them for cooperating with the investigation. I agree with this concern.
Second, the argument that the Senate report is more credible because the Senate Intelligence Committee was chaired by a Republican when the report was issued is a ruse. The reason is that the committee’s then-chairman Richard Burr was so weak that his critics used to joke that vice chairman Mark Warner (D-VA) actually ran the committee. I also want to emphasize that claims in the media, including by NBC News, that Marco Rubio was the Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee when the Senate report was issued, are false. The Senate report was released on April 21, 2020. Rubio became acting chairman a month later.
It is my hope that under the current Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Tom Cotton (R-TN), the committee will reissue a more objective version of the April 2020 Senate Intelligence Committee report. My other criticisms of the Senate Intelligence Committee report can be found in this April 22, 2020, Fox News op-ed.
Critics have made several other weak and misleading arguments to discredit the House report.
Former CIA Director Brennan and former DNI Clapper, in a July 30 New York Times op-ed, defended the ICA’s findings by making the false claim that “every serious review” has substantiated the ICA’s finding that the Russians conducted an influence campaign intended to help Mr. Trump win the 2016 election. This included their assertion that a separate June 26, 2025, CIA review of the ICA determined that its “level of analytic rigor exceeded that of most [intelligence] assessments.” This is also untrue. In fact, the June 2025 CIA assessment contained almost identical criticisms of the ICA as the House report.
Brennan and Clapper also disputed that the Steele Dossier was used as a source or taken into account for any of the ICA’s analysis or conclusions, ignoring the House report’s extensive findings to the contrary.
Former CIA officer Susan Miller, who identifies herself as one of the ICA’s authors, attacked the House report in recent media interviews. She disputed the report’s findings as based on false statements and misrepresentations of discoveries made by her team, which she insisted were based on multiple trusted and verified sources. Miller has accused DNI Gabbard and the White House of lying about the ICA and claimed Gabbard does not understand intelligence matters. Miller also insisted that the report’s authors and the report itself were not politically biased.
However, Miller did not respond to the House report’s specific allegations that the ICA violated intelligence tradecraft standards. An ODNI spokeswoman also made this point when she said,
“Susan is wrong. And the American people can read for themselves hundreds of reasons why she is wrong in the declassified HPSCI report.”
In commenting on the release of the House report, Rick Crawford (R-AR), current chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said the report “exposes an unprecedented level of truth about the politically-driven Obama-era Intelligence Community Assessment, which falsely legitimized and fueled the Russia collusion hoax against President Trump and the American people.”
Crawford added, “This garbage ICA exploited the credibility that comes with the word ‘intelligence’ in the eyes of the American people. In reality, the HPSCI Majority staff report documents this product was, at best, a failure to follow basic standards that would get a student expelled from school and, at worst, a direct and intentional misrepresentation of available information.”
Chairman Crawford’s words perfectly epitomized the credibility of the House report and explained why its critics have tried so hard to discredit it. The enormous contributions this report will make to the current debate on the Russia collusion hoax and the history books are a credit to the leadership and vision of former House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes, who commissioned and oversaw the crucial House Intelligence Committee majority staff report on the fraudulent ICA that President Obama ordered with the intent to sabotage the first Trump presidency.
Fred Fleitz previously served as National Security Council chief of staff, a CIA analyst, and a House Intelligence Committee staff member. He is the Vice Chair of the America First Policy Institute’s Center for American Security.