The 2016 Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) concluding that Russian President Vladimir Putin “aspired” to help then-candidate Donald Trump win that year’s presidential election was a political hit job whose outcome was predetermined, a recent Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) review found.
On December 6, 2016, then-President Barack Obama directed then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper to report on allegations that Russia had attempted to influence the outcome of the election. The report concluded, among other things, that Putin wanted Trump, not former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, to be the next president of the United States.
A June 26 review of that report by the CIA’s Directorate of Analysis (DA) found that there were
multiple procedural anomalies in the preparation of the ICA. These included a highly compressed production timeline, stringent compartmentation, and excessive involvement of agency heads, all of which led to departures from standard practices in the drafting, coordination, and reviewing of the ICA. These departures impeded efforts to apply rigorous tradecraft, particularly to the assessment’s most contentious judgment.
(Tradecraft refers to the methods, techniques, and skills used in intelligence gathering.)
All this took place in a “politically charged environment” featuring intense political pressure and officials’ “conflicting public and private statements … about Russia’s role in the … election,” reads the report. Those statements included media leaks suggesting — accurately, it turns out — that the ICA’s conclusions had been reached before work on it had even begun.
According to the DA, an ICA normally takes “months to prepare,” yet the Trump-Russia ICA was rushed through in just three weeks. “CIA’s primary authors had less than a week to draft the assessment and less than two days to formally coordinate it with [intelligence-community] peers before it entered the formal review process at CIA.” Given that “the election had concluded, and the ICA was essentially a post-mortem analysis,” the “rushed timeline … raised questions about a potential political motive behind the White House tasking and timeline.”
The central piece of intelligence supporting the claim that Putin “aspired” to help Trump win was a highly classified CIA report to which then-CIA Director John Brennan had “tightly restricted access,” making it difficult if not impossible for non-CIA personnel to assess its merits, penned the DA. Without that report, there was no hard evidence behind the “aspired” judgment, only inferences. And one report, no matter how solidly sourced, is not enough to make a “high-confidence” judgment, as the CIA and FBI insisted the “aspired” judgment was.
Thus, the infamous Steele Dossier, which claimed Trump and Putin were in cahoots, was called into service to bolster the claim. The dossier, compiled at the behest of the Clinton campaign, was so lacking in credibility that its creator, former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele, couldn’t collect the $1 million the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) offered for proof of its authenticity. Nevertheless, the review says, FBI leaders insisted on its inclusion in the ICA; Brennan, over the objections of “ICA authors and multiple CIA managers,” concurred. Brennan “showed a preference for narrative consistency over analytical soundness” and “appeared more swayed by the Dossier’s general conformity with existing theories than by legitimate tradecraft concerns.”
The dossier, therefore, ended up in the ICA, which “implicitly elevated unsubstantiated claims to the status of credible supporting evidence, compromising the analytical integrity of the [‘aspired’] judgment,” wrote the DA.
Brennan also ensured that the CIA would lead the ICA drafting process and that only select agencies would coordinate it. In addition, the heads of those agencies were directly involved in the ICA’s development. Combined, these moves “resulted in the complete exclusion of key intelligence agencies from the process,” the DA found.
In an interview with the New York Post, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, who ordered the DA’s review, described the highly irregular ICA process as “Obama, [then-FBI Director James] Comey, Clapper and Brennan deciding ‘We’re going to screw Trump.’”
He continued:
It was, “We’re going to create this and put the imprimatur of an IC [intelligence community] assessment in a way that nobody can question it.” They stamped it as Russian collusion and then classified it so nobody could see it.
This led to Mueller [special counsel Robert Mueller’s inquiry, which concluded after two years that there was no Trump-Russia collusion]. It put the seal of approval of the intelligence community that Russia was helping Trump and that the Steele dossier was the scandal of our lifetime. It ate up the first two years of his [Trump’s first] presidency.
This being a CIA report, it naturally goes easy on the agency itself, preferring to blame the corruption on bad leadership. In response, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Rick Crawford (R-Ark.) had this to say on X Thursday:
The CIA’s self-review of its 2016 Intelligence Community Assessment on Russian Election Interference falls FAR SHORT of the full truth. It is abysmal CIA would put out a memo with half-truths, inaccuracies, and blatant omissions about the full extent of the Russia hoax and the deep state’s role. Even worse, they released this report while holding the Intel Committee’s report on the same issue hostage for 7 years.
Even multiple attempts to get Ratcliffe to release the committee’s report failed. Only a Wednesday letter to Trump finally got the job done.
With Crawford supporting declassification of that report, perhaps soon the American people will learn just how deeply the Deep State rot runs.