A senior FBI analyst interviewed by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence about shoddy intelligence used to prop up bogus claims of Russian collusion in the 2016 election said FBI leadership made it clear “we were to push this,” according to a 2020 HPSCI staff report that was declassified on Wednesday by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard.
“[T]he FBI senior analyst said that they were told by FBI leadership that all material, regardless of traditional sourcing standards, was to be made available in drafting the [Intelligence Community Assessment],” committee staff reported. The Intelligence Community Assessment, or ICA, was the infamous document ordered by outgoing President Barack Obama in which Obama intelligence officials claimed the Russians had “a clear preference for President-elect Trump” over Democrat candidate Hillary Clinton, and that the Russians had “aspired to help President-elect Trump’s election chances.” That document was used to launch the Russia-collusion hoax, an elaborate effort to hamstring the incoming Trump administration by painting him as a Russian asset.
As the staff report shows, the ICA omitted numerous pieces of intelligence that “challenged — and in some cases undermined” the ICA’s conclusion that Russian President Vladimir Putin wanted Trump to win the presidency. At the same time, CIA Director John Brennan did include unreliable, poorly-sourced intelligence to bolster the ICA’s flawed conclusions.
“Our instructions were that anything we had was to be used,” the unnamed senior FBI analyst told House investigators.
That guidance seems to have originated with President Obama himself. The HPSCI report found Brennan was acting in response to “direction from the President to make all information available.”
One of the several substandard sources included in the ICA was the Steele dossier, a collection of sensational claims about Donald Trump that was concocted by British spy Christopher Steele and commissioned by the Clinton campaign. The claims in the since-discredited Steele dossier were so ridiculous that senior CIA officials tried to keep it out of the ICA, according to the HPSCI report, but Brennan demanded it be included.
“CIA veterans noted that they could not imagine any previous director allowing such information in a formal CIA product,” congressional investigators reported.
Brennan also ordered the publication of three intelligence reports that would become “foundational” to the ICA’s flawed conclusions. He did so over the objection of veteran CIA personnel who said the reports “contained substandard information that was unclear, of uncertain origin, potentially biased, implausible, or in the words of senior operations officers, ‘odd.'”
This shoddy “intelligence” was used to portray Trump as Putin’s preferred candidate, a hoax that did immense damage to the first Trump administration and to the country. To reach that unsubstantiated conclusion, the Obama intelligence agencies not only ignored key evidence to the contrary but “attempt[ed] to force-fit weak evidence to make their case,” the HPSCI found.
Investigators also noted the senior FBI analyst they interviewed “carefully chose” his words. The FBI “would not allow any other analysts to be interviewed” by congressional investigators, the report said.