Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has declassified a long-buried House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) report exposing the fraud at the heart of the Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) released in January 2017.

That ICA — produced by the CIA, FBI, and NSA at the behest of President Obama — claimed that Vladimir Putin helped Donald Trump win the presidency. It became a weaponized talking point, casting a shadow over Trump’s legitimacy before he even took office.

The HPSCI launched its investigation into the ICA on January 25, 2017, just days after Trump was sworn in. Then-Chairman Devin Nunes, who would later play a pivotal role in unraveling the Russiagate hoax, apparently sensed something was deeply wrong. But the committee’s investigation was met with years of stonewalling and obstruction from intelligence agencies. The report just released dates back to September 2020 but was kept from the public until now. Only now, under Gabbard’s leadership, is it finally seeing the light of day.

And it is explosive.

The report doesn’t just detail flaws in tradecraft or analytic sloppiness. It documents an intentional fraud — driven by then-CIA Director John Brennan — designed to paint Trump as a Russian asset and delegitimize his presidency.

The ICA’s Purpose Was Always Political

The ICA’s core purpose was to tie Trump’s victory to Putin, and the HPSCI report makes clear that this narrative was constructed from day one. Crucially, it was not supported by actual intelligence.

One key document, newly released by Gabbard just days ago, serves as a critical anchor: the draft President’s Daily Brief (PDB) from Dec. 8, 2016. It stated that Russian activity was “probably intended to cause psychological effects, such as undermining the credibility of the election process and candidates.” Notably, it did not assess that Putin preferred Trump.

Yet, as the new HPSCI report reveals, President Obama had already ordered the creation of the ICA two days earlier, on Dec. 6, before the PDB, and before any intelligence concluded that Putin had a preference. The conclusion came first. The intelligence was bent to match it.

Brennan’s Four Fabrications

To justify the ICA’s conclusion that Putin wanted Trump to win, Brennan pushed four specific claims into the document, despite strenuous objections from intelligence professionals. The HPSCI report notes that no previous CIA director had ever overruled senior analysts on basic factual grounds in this way.

1. The Single-Source ‘Fragment‘

The first was a snippet from a lone HUMINT (human intelligence) source, with an anti-Trump bias who claimed: “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 Trump], whose victory Putin was counting on, most likely would not be able to pull off a convincing victory.”

As one senior CIA officer told HPSCI staff, “We don’t know what was meant by that,” and “five people read it five ways.” CIA officers also admitted: “We don’t have direct information that Putin wanted to get Trump elected.”

The HPSCI report offers several alternative explanations, including that “counting on” may have simply meant “expected,” or that the reference was possibly to Trump securing the Republican nomination, not the presidency. The ICA also failed to mention that the exact circumstances under which the source’s subsource obtained the information were unclear, nor was it established whether the statement reflected the subsource’s own opinion. It also did not mention that the sources’ motivations “were in part driven by a strong dislike for Putin and his regime, and that the source had an anti-Trump bias.” Despite this bias, the source never actually said that Putin preferred Trump. Yet Brennan used this vague, unverified snippet as a cornerstone of the ICA’s central claim.

The New York Times has now confirmed, without explicitly naming him, what had long been an open secret among Russiagate researchers that Brennan’s supposed super source was Oleg Smolenkov. According to Dmitry Peskov, press secretary to the Russian president, Smolenkov was a low-level staffer in the presidential administration until 2016 or 2017 and had no direct contact with Putin. Yet for feeding Brennan a vague snippet suggesting Putin’s supposed preference for Trump, Smolenkov appears to have been rewarded with a U.S. green card and a comfortable home in Northern Virginia — where he allegedly lived openly, under his real name, and apparently without much fear of Russian retaliation.

2. The Anonymous Ukrainian Tip

The second of Brennan’s tips was even flimsier: Brennan ordered inclusion of information from an anonymous email claiming Russia planned engagement with the Trump campaign as far back as February 2016. There was zero evidence that the Trump team ever reciprocated or was even aware of such plans.

What the ICA did not disclose was that the tip came from a Ukrainian intelligence source with known anti-Trump bias. In fact, at the time, the Ukrainian government was openly hostile to Trump, with top officials publicly attacking him.

While much of the information on Ukrainian sourcing is redacted in the newly released HPSCI report, one paragraph lets “Kiev” slip through. The date is also revealing. In January 2016, a delegation of Ukrainian officials met with Obama administration figures, including later Ukraine impeachment “whistleblower” Eric Ciaramella. According to Ukrainian participant Andrii Telizhenko, the meeting focused on targeting Trump, specifically by pushing connections between Trump, Paul Manafort, and Russia to benefit Hillary Clinton.

3. The ‘Putin Inner Circle’ Fantasy

The third Brennan claim — that members of Putin’s inner circle preferred Trump — is probably the flimsiest of all, though the competition is admittedly fierce. A supposedly “established” source claimed to have heard a secondhand account about something allegedly said in 2014, before Trump was even a candidate. No one knows where the information originated, or if it did at all.

Even worse, the actual CIA reports cited in the ICA said the opposite: that senior Russian officials feared Republicans for being too hawkish. So while the ICA told the public Russia preferred Trump, the raw intelligence said Russia feared him.

4. The Steele Dossier

The fourth — and most infamous — input was the fraudulent Steele dossier.

For years we were told the dossier was merely an appendix, peripheral to the ICA. That was a lie. The new HPSCI report confirms it was cited in the main text as evidence of Putin’s alleged support for Trump.

Just as with his other three supposed intelligence leads, career intelligence officials urged Brennan not to include it. One CIA officer recalled Brennan brushing aside concerns about the dossier’s complete lack of verification: “Yes, but doesn’t it ring true?” After overruling their objections, Brennan lied to Congress about the dossier’s use in the ICA, first in 2017, then again in 2023.

The report notes that FBI Director James Comey also pushed for inclusion of the Steele dossier — despite knowing by early 2017 that its primary source, Igor Danchenko, had already disavowed it. According to the HPSCI report, Comey later lied to the White House in February 2017, specifically to then–Chief of Staff Reince Priebus, when asked about the ICA. He claimed that all three agencies had agreed to include the dossier (false), that Christopher Steele was a credible source (false), and that the dossier’s claims were corroborated by other intelligence (also false).

5. Brennan’s Most Brazen Deception

As bad as all this is, the most brazen abuse may be buried in a footnote.

According to the HPSCI report, Brennan personally blocked two HUMINT reports — presumably because they contradicted his narrative — from being formally disseminated.

From the report:

“CIA officers also said that DCIA [Brennan] personally directed that two of the most important reports not be formally disseminated … By briefing information orally, however, DCIA could have tailored his message to different officials, unconstrained by a consistent record copy.”

This isn’t run-of-the-mill fudging. It’s a calculated abuse of power. There’s little doubt that DOJ officials handling the Brennan criminal referrals will now zero in on this footnote, which stands as prima facie evidence of deliberate deception.

The Real Intelligence Was Buried

The intelligence community had clear evidence that Putin did not prefer Trump. One CIA assessment noted that Russian intelligence had collected damaging material on Hillary Clinton but never released it. If Russia truly wanted Trump to win, why hold back?

That basic question — never asked in the ICA — undercuts the entire narrative. So does the repeated mismatch between the ICA’s conclusions and the citations supposedly supporting them. On top of that, Brennan’s purported intelligence was so flimsy and comically absurd that it only further exposes the fraudulent nature of the assessment.

Over and over again, the ICA claimed Putin wanted Trump, while the underlying intelligence either said he had no preference or leaned toward Clinton.

The new HPSCI report stands in stark contrast to the sanitized CIA internal review released earlier this month by former DNI John Ratcliffe, which focused on minor tradecraft issues while downplaying the political corruption at the heart of the ICA. This report is different. It hits directly — and by name — at John Brennan, exposing his central role in rigging the ICA to damage Trump.

Brennan, aided by Comey, engineered the fraudulent core of the ICA — but it was Obama who set the wheels in motion by ordering it in advance, placing him at the foundation of the deception and no less accountable than those who executed it.