A document dump from Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard showed that intelligence community allegations that Russian leader Vladimir Putin supported President Donald Trump in the 2016 election were based on unfounded speculations contained in a report ordered by then-President Barack Obama.
The 2020 review of an intelligence community assessment that was the foundation for many of the since-discredited allegations that Russia supported Trump was posted online by Gabbard. ICA is the acronym used in the report for the flawed assessment. IC stands for intelligence community, and DCIA stands for the director of the CIA.
The report that smeared Trump was “a high-profile product ordered by the President, directed by senior IC agency heads, and created by just five CIA analysts, using one principal drafter. Production of the ICA was subject to unusual directives from the President and senior political appointees, and particularly DCIA.”
Then-CIA Director John Brennan “ordered the post-election publication of 15 reports containing previously collected but unpublished intelligence, three of which were substandard — containing information that was unclear, of uncertain origin, potentially biased, or implausible — and those became foundational sources for the ICA judgments that Putin preferred Trump over Clinton. The ICA misrepresented these reports as reliable, without mentioning their significant underlying flaws.”
BREAKING: A declassified report reveals Obama’s intel officials had no direct proof Putin backed Trump in 2016 but published the claim anyway under Obama’s orders. pic.twitter.com/zzA8iveG8w
— The General (@GeneralMCNews) July 23, 2025
The report said production of a report stitching together unpublished assessments linking Trump to Russia was rushed “in order to publish two weeks before President-elect Trump was sworn-in. Hurried coordination and limited access to the draft reduced opportunities for the IC to discover misquoting of sources and other tradecraft errors.”
The report’s bottom line was that Putin meddled as best he could in the 2016 election “to undermine faith in the U.S. democratic process and to weaken what the Russians considered to be an inevitable Clinton presidency,” and that assessments saying so were based on sound research and analysis.
However, the report said, “the judgments that Putin developed ‘a clear preference’ for candidate Trump and ‘aspired to help his chances of victory’” failed to meet those standards.
“One scant, unclear, and unverifiable fragment of a sentence from one of the substandard reports constitutes the only classified information cited to suggest Putin ‘aspired’ to help Trump win.”
“The ICA ignored or selectively quoted reliable intelligence reports that challenged — and in some cases undermined — judgments that Putin sought to elect Trump,” the report said, adding, “The ICA failed to consider plausible alternative explanations of Putin’s intentions indicated by reliable intelligence and observed Russian actions.”
“These failures were serious enough to call into question judgments that allege Putin ‘developed a clear preference for candidate Trump’ and ‘aspired to help his chances of victory’ and that ‘Russian leaders never entirely abandoned hope for a defeat of Secretary Clinton,’” the report said.
???? BREAKING: DNI Tulsi Gabbard just released reports PROVING that Obama DIRECTLY gave the order to publish the Russia Collusion Hoax, knowing there was no proof that Putin backed Trump
Holy CRAP.
Tulsi just proved Obama lied AGAIN in his statement yesterday.
Obama should be… pic.twitter.com/vLF5c8fde0
— Nick Sortor (@nicksortor) July 23, 2025
The report said, assessments that Putin backed Trump “contained flaws in terms of clarity or reliability. The ICA omitted or obscured such information from context statements — that the CIA’s Directorate of Operations had properly added to raw human source intelligence (HUMINT) reports-thus failing to warn the reader of significant flaws.”
The report said a mountain of allegations was deliberately built on a sentence multiple analysts read multiple ways. It read: “Putin had made this decision [to leak DNC emails] after he had come to believe that the Democratic nominee had better odds of winning the U.S. presidential election, and that [candidate Trum], whose victory, Putin was counting on, most likely would not be able to pull off a convincing victory.”
“The significance of this fragment to the ICA case that Putin ‘aspired’ for candidate Trump to win cannot be overstated. The major ‘high confidence’ judgment of the ICA rests on one opinion about a text fragment with uncertain meaning, that may be a garble, and for which it is not clear how it was obtained.”
The report said that although the final report said Putin’s inner circle “strongly preferred Republicans,” that phrase “does not appear in the raw intelligence report.” Further a comment that Russia liked dealing with Republicans due to their lack of concern for human rights “does not appear to make sense in the historical context, further raising the question of the reliability of the unknown subsource.”
Although some internal eyebrows were raised at the time, the report said, “Despite unknown sourcing, reliable contrary evidence, and implausible claims, the then Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, responding to a request to double check the sourcing behind the judgment, responded in a letter … that he nonetheless endorsed the ICA judgment.”
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