Top officials working on an intelligence community analysis about Russia’s interference in the 2016 election were overruled by CIA Director John Brennan, according to records exclusively reviewed by The Federalist. The records are related to ongoing criminal investigations into Brennan and other top intelligence officials for their roles in launching the Russia collusion hoax.
The dispute was over the “key judgment” in a January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) that Russia had interfered in the election specifically because Putin and the Russian government “aspired to help President-elect Trump’s election chances.”
The senior intelligence officials pointed out the lack of evidence to substantiate the claim. “We have no intelligence to directly support this ‘aspiration’ point,” said one member of the small group of individuals working with Brennan, FBI Director James Comey, and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper on the assessment of Russian activity in the lead-up to the 2016 election.
The official worried that the inclusion of the claim would “open the IC to a line of very politicized inquiry that is sure to come up when this paper is shared with the Hill.” A recent CIA analysis of the inclusion of this disputed “key judgment” noted the risks of including poorly supported judgments since skeptical readers are inclined to “reject an entire analysis if a single judgment appears exaggerated, biased, or unsupported.”
The experts did not disagree that Russia had continued its practice of attempting to sow chaos in presidential elections. They believed the intelligence indicated Russia sought to weaken presumptive winner Hillary Clinton and those efforts may have indirectly helped Trump. But they were concerned about the lack of evidence for the claim that became a cornerstone of the Russia collusion narrative, in which Trump was accused of conspiring with Russia to steal the 2016 election.
“Can you really prove Moscow was trying to get Trump elected?” the official asked in late December 2016.
Brennan called the dissenting individuals into his office on Dec. 30, 2016, and had a lengthy meeting in which they articulated their serious concerns. “The assessment will stay the same,” Brennan reported at the end of the meeting.
The paper trail about this dispute posed a problem for Brennan, who had presented the information as being universally held with a high degree of confidence. The CIA review noted that the key judgment was given a “higher confidence level than was justified.” It further noted the ICA had been drafted under an unusually rushed timeline, had been preceded by leaks to The Washington Post and New York Times improperly claiming “definitive conclusions” had already been reached, and had indications of a “potential political motive.”
Brennan later threw the dissenting officials under the bus when he recounted the events. Explaining his decision to ignore the concerns of the career intelligence experts, he said, “I came to the conclusion that the two officers had not read all the available intelligence,” Brennan wrote in his 2020 book Undaunted, of his decision to keep the key judgment despite the concerns.
The top managers in the CIA’s Russia unit were “not closely tracking all of the intelligence available,” Brennan said, according to a letter from his attorney to Special Counsel John Durham. He further claimed he had personal knowledge of “raw intelligence” that the Russia experts hadn’t seen. The letter was provided earlier this month to The Atlantic, a publication that participated in the Russia collusion hoax, after CIA Director John Ratcliffe released a review showing serious problems with the creation of the ICA.
Brennan has never publicly shared what his secret knowledge was that led him to make the claim that Russia sought to help Trump, although it had purportedly been collected in July and first disseminated on Dec. 19, to supposedly support the ICA’s conclusion that Russia wanted to elect Trump. But even then, Brennan “tightly restricted access to this information.” The CIA review of the ICA questioned “whether the extreme limitations on access to underlying intelligence within the IC during the ICA’s preparation was justifiable,” given that following its release, the highest classified version of the ICA was shopped around to literally hundreds of U.S. officials. Further, even those who viewed the “secret” information strenuously debated whether it meant Putin aspired to help Trump or not.
The New York Times previously revealed in April 2017 that Brennan began shopping the claim regarding Russia supporting Trump in private briefings to numerous members of Congress during August and September of 2016.
When Brennan briefed then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell on his claim that Russia sought to “enhance the electoral prospects of Donald Trump,” McConnell, according to Brennan, responded dryly, “One might say that the CIA and the Obama administration are making such claims in order to prevent Donald Trump from getting elected president.”
Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, by contrast, worked with Brennan on the contours of a public letter about the Russia collusion hoax.
A CIA briefing of the Senate Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence in late November 2016 included the claim as well. Senate Democrats pushed Obama to publicly release evidence that the Kremlin pushed voters to choose Trump. Prior to Brennan’s inclusion of the claim in the ICA, the key judgment was leaked to The Washington Post, falsely portraying it as a CIA conclusion that had already been reached.
“The CIA has concluded in a secret assessment that Russia intervened in the 2016 election to help Donald Trump win the presidency, rather than just to undermine confidence in the U.S. electoral system, according to officials briefed on the matter,” wrote Washington Post reporters Adam Entous, Ellen Nakashima, and Greg Miller on Dec. 9, 2016. The three reporters later received Pulitzers for their roles in perpetuating the Russia collusion hoax.
The New York Times also reported, based on anonymous sources, that the claim had been definitively reached with a high degree of confidence. The CIA allegedly had information that Russians had hacked the Republican National Committee but “did not release whatever information they gleaned,” wrote David Sanger and Scott Shane. The two later received Pulitzers for their roles in promulgating the Russia collusion hoax. Republican officials, for what it’s worth, repeatedly disputed that claim, saying that their networks were never compromised.
The Steele dossier was listed in the ICA as one of the items substantiating the claim that Putin tried to help Trump. After the briefing of the ICA to Obama and Trump, details leaked almost immediately to CNN. When CNN’s Jake Tapper, Evan Perez, Jim Sciutto, and Carl Bernstein reported on the briefings and the ICA, they specifically mentioned that the summary of the Steele dossier “augmented the evidence that Moscow intended to harm Clinton’s candidacy and help Trump’s, several officials with knowledge of the briefings tell CNN.”
The new records reviewed exclusively by The Federalist buttress recent claims from the CIA and Director of National Intelligence that career officers’ opposition to including an assessment that Russia sought to help Trump was much stronger than previously reported in government reviews of the Russia collusion hoax.
The records reviewed by The Federalist also reveal CIA Deputy Director David Cohen claimed not to understand the profound difference between the conclusion that Russia sought to undermine Clinton and the unsupported claim that Putin actively sought to help elect Trump, calling it a “distinction without a difference.” The distinction was easily understood by the members of the intelligence community who leaked false and misleading information to the media to frame Trump as colluding with Putin to get elected.
Margot Cleveland contributed to this report.