They have repeatedly lied to Congress.
Explosive new evidence suggests that some of the highest-ranking officials in the Obama-era CIA and FBI perjured themselves regarding their claims that Russian President Vladimir Putin helped Donald Trump secure his victory in 2016.
A newly released CIA review challenges their sworn denials to Congress that the Steele dossier -- a discredited set of allegations about Trump funded by Hillary Clinton's campaign -- was used as the basis for the years-long Russiagate probe that hamstrung President Trump's first term.
The eight-page review conducted by career CIA analysts found the dossier did, in fact, worm its way into the text of the highly classified report known as an Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) to buttress the thinly sourced, yet inflammatory allegation that "Putin and the Russian Government aspired to help President-elect Trump's election chances."
"Ultimately, agency heads decided to include a two-page summary of the dossier as an annex to the ICA, with a disclaimer that the material was not used 'to reach the analytic conclusions,'" the CIA review said on page five. "However, by placing a reference to the annex material in the main body of the ICA as the fourth supporting bullet for the judgment that Putin 'aspired' to help Trump win, the ICA implicitly elevated [the dossier's] unsubstantiated claims to the status of credible supporting evidence, compromising the analytical integrity of the judgment."
The CIA's "lessons-learned" report contradicts Obama administration officials' claims -- most of which were made under oath -- that they did not use the since-debunked dossier.
Former CIA Director John Brennan, for one, insisted in his sworn May 2017 testimony before Congress that the Steele dossier was not "in any way" used as a basis for the so-called ICA completed in late December 2016. Later, during a May 2023 House Judiciary Committee interview, Brennan claimed: "The CIA was very much opposed to having any reference or inclusion of the Steele dossier in the Intelligence Community Assessment."
Likewise, then-National Intelligence Director James Clapper said in an official January 2017 statement that "we did not rely upon [the dossier] in any way for our conclusions." Several months later, he assured Congress the dossier was "not a formal part of the Intelligence Community Assessment."
More recently, Clapper also swore, "We didn't use [the dossier] in our Intelligence Community Assessment" and "We didn't use it for the Intelligence Community Assessment, we didn't draw on it." [Emphasis added.] In the same May 2023 House Judiciary interview, which was conducted in closed session but during which he was advised of federal perjury laws, he expounded that "the team that put together the Intelligence Community Assessment was not to draw on it as a source for the Intelligence Community Assessment. So you won't find a footnote using the dossier as a source."
While testifying in a December 2017 deposition, moreover, former deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe asserted that although a written summary of the dossier was appended to the classified version of the ICA, it was never referred to "in the main body" of the intel report.
"I participated in conversations [with Brennan and Clapper] in the consideration of how to handle the Steele reporting with respect to the ICA. And ultimately it ended up being included in 'attachment A,' rather than in the main body of the report," he told the House Intelligence Committee, according to a transcript of the closed-door interview. "It's handled and referred to in an appendix," he added, "and not in the main body."
McCabe's boss, former FBI Director James B. Comey, swore the same thing during a September 2020 Senate Judiciary Committee hearing: "It was significant enough and consistent enough with other intelligence that it ought to be included, but it wasn't sufficiently corroborated to be in the body of the Intelligence Community Assessment."
The CIA review shows that the unverified and now-debunked dossier was used as support for the intelligence analysis, not just as a sidebar as Obama officials have maintained. And they relied on it to back the most inflammatory finding in the intelligence report.
The new report also raises fresh questions about the candor of the Obama administration's top intel operatives and whether they politicized intelligence to paint incoming GOP President Donald Trump as compromised by the Kremlin.
In an X post last week, deputy CIA Director Michael Ellis said newly declassified CIA emails "show how Brennan personally intervened to insert the Steele dossier's lies into intelligence analysis" over the objections of his top Russia analysts at Langley.
Margot Cleveland of the Federalist writes that the case is even worse than Ratcliffe's report suggested.
A still-classified staff report compiled by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) found the John Brennan-led 2016 Intelligence Community Assessment ("ICA") on Russian Election Interference significantly worse and significantly more corrupt than conveyed in the memorandum released last week by CIA Director John Ratcliffe, according to sources familiar with the report. The HPSCI staff report also reveals more details of the corruption, the sources told The Federalist.
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But those problems and the others detailed in the CIA report pale in comparison to the real corruption at play, according to sources familiar with a separate HPSCI staff report. Those sources told The Federalist that HPSCI, under the leadership of then-Chair Devin Nunes, "found the ICA significantly worse and significantly more corrupt than was conveyed in the CIA report." The staff report also reveals more details related to the ICA's report on Russia's 2016 influence campaign.
The HPSCI staff report, however, remains classified. In a letter to President Trump last week, current HPSCI Chair Rick Crawford, R-Ark., noted there was a strong public interest in the report being declassified. A HPSCI spokesperson told The Federalist that "it is the Committee's view that the information in this report should be released to the public." The spokesperson added that Chairman Crawford has raised this issue with CIA leadership.
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Given his record, there is no reason to doubt that Director Ratcliffe will ensure the HPSCI staff report will be declassified when the time is right. Here, the public would be well advised to remember that transparency and accountability may sometimes be at cross purposes: It may well be that Director Ratcliffe or the other members of the Trump Administration working to rid D.C. of the Augean-stable levels of corruption have not yet finished investigating the additional details and/or individuals implicated in the HPSCI staff report. And if that is the case, perjury may be the least of Brennan's worries.
Matt Taibbi thinks that this dispute is mostly a "misunderstanding." He says that Ratcliffe wrote his short 8-page report in order to give Kash Patel the grounds to open a perjury investigation, but one shouldn't take this as Ratcliffe's last word on the subject. He says the other allegations can come in once the investigation has begun.
He says that at least the full report on Brennan's and Comey's crimes has now been released from the CIA vault in which it had been hidden.
The HPSCI report has remained classified and "in a vault at the CIA" for seven long years. This followed the same pattern as the WMD episode, where the CIA did not release its full 93-page National Intelligence Estimate* on Iraq until 2015, thirteen years after a redacted version was released to the public to sell the invasion. The full document, hidden from the American public before the war, determined there was no operational tie between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda.
HPSCI investigators who hoped the new Trump administration would aggressively pursue the leads Kash Patel's team dug up in 2017 and 2018 were both puzzled by the release of Ratcliffe's relatively tamer report last week, and upset that their more hard-hitting work remained locked up. After Crawford sent his letter, however, Trump interceded and Ratcliffe returned the original HPSCI report to Crawford on the Hill. The HPSCI material remains classified, but at least it's no longer being "held hostage" at Langley, as Crawford put it, in a public note of thanks tweeted last Thursday.
The news that the FBI is now opening criminal investigations into Brennan and Comey seems to have mollified some of those close to the original HPSCI investigation. "I don't know how the fuck they got here, but I'm happy they did," laughed one source familiar with the full HPSCI report.
The same source was not disappointed that the FBI is "only" looking at charges like perjury or conspiracy. "You have to understand, there's no statute that really fits what these people did," the source said. "But there is one against lying to Congress, and given that that's what they have to work with, the Ratcliffe report makes more sense to me now."