CIA Director John Ratcliffe on Wednesday announced the declassified release of a new report identifying “anomalies” in a 2016 intelligence assessment on alleged Russian interference in the presidential election that brought Donald Trump to power nearly nine years ago.
In May, Ratcliffe directed the agency’s directorate of analysis to conduct a lessons-learned review of the 2016 assessment.
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The review particularly focused on the intelligence community assessment’s claim “that Russian President Vladimir Putin ‘aspired’ to help then-candidate Donald Trump win the election,” according to the declassified, mostly unredacted report issued Thursday.
“The tradecraft review identified multiple procedural anomalies in the preparation of the 2016 ICA, such as a compressed timeline, uneven access to compartmented information, marginalization of the National Intelligence Council, and excessive involvement of agency heads,” a CIA press release reads. “The review notes that adhering to established analytic processes and rigorous tradecraft is essential to ensure credibility, objectivity, and accuracy of CIA analysis.”
Agency leadership at the time conducted an analysis to determine whether Russia’s alleged influence campaign led to Trump’s victory in the 2016 presidential election. This premise conflicts with analytic standards that state analysis should be conducted “independent of political consideration” and “must not be distorted by, nor shaped for, advocacy of a particular audience, agenda, or policy viewpoint,” according to Intelligence Community Directive 203.
Media leaks about the intelligence community’s definitive conclusion that Putin helped Trump win also played a role, which the CIA concluded “risked creating an anchoring bias” before the assessment began. For instance, the Washington Post and the New York Times cited an anonymous source who said the intelligence community came to a consensus on the issue.
The clandestine agency also rushed the assessment’s timeline, which Ratcliffe’s CIA says could have been avoided.
“Broader access to reporting—both prior to and throughout the preparation of the ICA—almost certainly would have led to more robust analytic debate,” the report reads. “Even within the small circle of collaborators cleared for the most sensitive information, the judgment that Putin ‘aspired’ to help Trump win prompted healthy and protracted debate. Including more voices with more time to weigh in undoubtedly would have refined, challenged, or surfaced analytic differences on that question or on other aspects of the ICA.”
The document also notes how the assessment’s authors cited a portion of a credible report that agreed with their “high confidence” assessment that Russia wanted to undermine democracy in the United States and denigrate 2016 Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton, while omitting “information that conflicted with the ‘aspired’ judgment.”
“The omitted information, as well as a small body of other credibly sourced reporting that also was not cited in the ICA, suggested Putin was more ambivalent about which candidate won the election,” it reads.
RATCLIFFE PRIORITIZES DEPOLITICIZING CIA WITH VOW TO STOP TERRORISTS OVERSEAS
The CIA discovered several lessons from retroactively analyzing the 2016 report, including the dangers of a rapidly completed assessment and the importance of sufficient sourcing.
“Agency heads at the time created a politically charged environment that triggered an atypical analytic process around an issue essential to our democracy,” Ratcliffe said. “Under my watch, I am committed to ensuring that our analysts have the ability to deliver unvarnished assessments that are free from political influence.”