by Jerry Dunleavy
CIA Director John Ratcliffe on Wednesday released a scathing review of the U.S. intelligence community’s assessment of Russian influence in the 2016 election, criticizing then-CIA Director John Brennan for joining the FBI in pushing to include British ex-spy Christopher Steele’s baseless anti-Trump dossier.
In the review, Ratcliffe also critiqued the CIA and FBI’s “high confidence” assessment that Russian leader Vladimir Putin had “aspired” to help Trump win.
The newly-released, largely declassified, eight-page “lessons learned” review, dated June 26 – focuses on the December 2016 Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) about Russia and the November 2016 election – was put together by the CIA’s Directorate of Analysis (DA) at Ratcliffe’s direction and concluded that “the decision by agency heads to include the Steele Dossier in the ICA ran counter to fundamental tradecraft principles and ultimately undermined the credibility of a key judgment.”
The review also pointed the finger at Brennan as well as at the leadership of the FBI at the time.
Ratcliffe tweeted on Tuesday, in announcing the review being made public, that President Donald Trump “has trusted me with helping to end weaponization of U.S. intelligence” and that “today’s report underscores that the 2016 IC Assessment was conducted through an atypical & corrupt process under the politically charged environments” of Brennan & since-fired FBI Director James Comey.
“The procedural anomalies that characterized the ICA’s development had a direct impact on the tradecraft applied to its most contentious finding. With analysts operating under severe time constraints, limited information sharing, and heightened senior-level scrutiny, several aspects of tradecraft rigor were compromised—particularly in supporting the judgment that Putin ‘aspired’ to help Trump win,” reads the report.
“The DA Review identified multiple specific concerns, including: a higher confidence level than was justified; insufficient exploration of alternative scenarios; lack of transparency on source uncertainty; uneven argumentation; and the inclusion of unsubstantiated Steele Dossier material.”
Comey and former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe had also pushed in December 2016 to include Steele’s debunked dossier in the body of the 2016 ICA on alleged Russian meddling. They were largely thwarted by the NSA and others – yet the dossier was still included in an annex to the assessment.
The Ratcliffe-ordered review found that “ICA authors and multiple senior CIA managers – including the two senior leaders of the CIA mission center responsible for Russia— strongly opposed including the Dossier, asserting that it did not meet even the most basic tradecraft standards” and that the CIA’s then-deputy director for analysis warned in a late December 2020 email to Brennan that including the dossier in any form risked “the credibility of the entire paper.”
“Despite these objections, Brennan showed a preference for narrative consistency over analytical soundness. When confronted with specific flaws in the Dossier by the two mission center leaders—one with extensive operational experience and the other with a strong analytic background – he appeared more swayed by the Dossier’s general conformity with existing theories than by legitimate tradecraft concerns,” the CIA said in its new review, with the declassified lessons learned document stating that Brennan had written that “my bottomline is that I believe that the information warrants inclusion in the report.”
The CIA said in the review: “Ultimately, agency heads decided to include a two-page summary of the Dossier as an annex to the ICA, with a disclaimer that the material was not used ‘to reach the analytic conclusions.’ However, by placing a reference to the annex material in the main body of the ICA as the fourth supporting bullet for the judgment that Putin ‘aspired’ to help Trump win, the ICA implicitly elevated unsubstantiated claims to the status of credible supporting evidence, compromising the analytical integrity of the judgment.”
The newly-released CIA review also revealed that “ICA authors first learned of the Dossier, and FBI leadership’s insistence on its inclusion, on 20 December [2016]—the same day the largely coordinated draft was entering the review process at CIA” and that “FBI leadership made it clear that their participation in the ICA hinged on the Dossier’s inclusion and, over the next few days, repeatedly pushed to weave references to it throughout the main body of the ICA.”
CIA Deputy Director Michael Ellis tweeted Tuesday that newly-declassified documents “show how Brennan and Comey personally intervened to insert the Steele dossier’s lies into intelligence analysis. We must have zero tolerance for the weaponization of intelligence.”
The CIA review also critiqued one of the ICA’s “high confidence” assessments on Putin’s motivations in the 2016 election, bluntly concluding that “the ‘aspired’ judgment did not merit the ‘high confidence’ level that CIA and FBI attached to it.”
The January 2017 assessment from the CIA, the FBI, and the National Security Agency (NSA) concluded with “high confidence” that Putin “ordered an influence campaign in 2016” and that Russia worked to “undermine public faith in the U.S. democratic process, denigrate former Secretary of State [Hillary] Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency” and “developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump.”
Adm. Mike Rogers, then the leader of the NSA, diverged from Brennan and Comey on one key aspect, expressing only “moderate confidence” rather than “high confidence” that Putin had “aspired to help” Trump’s election chances in 2016 by “discrediting” Clinton” and publicly contrasting her unfavorably to him.”
The new review stated that “NSA and a few other participants were not comfortable with ascribing ‘high confidence’ to the ‘aspired’ judgment. They cited the limited source base, lack of corroborating intelligence, and ‘the possibility for an alternative judgment’ as driving their discomfort.”
The review also found that in one instance the authors of the 2016 ICA “cited part of a credibly sourced report that supported the ‘high confidence’ assessment on the first two goals of the Putin-directed campaign – undermining the US democratic process and denigrating Clinton – but omitted 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.”
The CIA’s new review “does not dispute the quality and credibility of the highly classified CIA serialized report that the ICA authors relied on to drive the ‘aspired’ judgment. … However, given the centrality of this singular report to the ‘aspired’ judgment, the authors probably should have more clearly addressed the uncertainty with how the cited information on Putin’s intentions was acquired.”
The lessons learned review also stated that, in December 2016, “the two senior leaders of the CIA mission center responsible for Russia argued jointly against including the ‘aspire’ judgment” and that they sent a late December 2016 email to Brennan where “they stated the judgment should be removed because it was both weakly supported and unnecessary, given the strength and logic of the paper’s other findings on intent” and warned that including it would only “open up a line of very politicized inquiry.”
Rogers previously talked about his view on the ICA during testimony before the Senate in May 2017, noting that sourcing was a factor in his judgment.
“I wouldn’t call it a discrepancy. I’d call it an honest difference of opinion between three different organizations, and in the end, I made that call,” Rogers said.
“When I looked at all of the available data, I was struck by, for every other key judgment in the report, I had multiple sources, multiple disciplines, and I was able to remove almost every other alternative rationale that I could come up with in my mind for, well, could there be another reason to explain this. In the case of that one particular point, it didn’t have the same level of sourcing and the same level of multiple sources from different perspectives — you know, human intelligence, signals intelligence.”
Brennan, Comey, Rogers, and then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper briefed President-elect Trump about their election meddling findings at Trump Tower in January 2017. Comey stayed behind to tell Trump about some of the dossier’s more salacious allegations.
The Steele dossier annex to the ICA was largely declassified in 2020, and it relayed some of Steele’s baseless collusion claims: “The most politically-sensitive claims by the FBI source [Steele] alleged a close relationship between the President-elect and the Kremlin.
The source also claimed that the president-elect and his top campaign advisers knowingly worked with Russian officials to bolster his chances of beating Clinton; were fully knowledgeable of Russia’s direction of leaked Democratic emails; and were offered financial compensation from Moscow.”
The Senate Intelligence Committee released a bipartisan report in 2020 defending the 2016 ICA.
The panel said congressional investigators found no evidence of political pressure and determined the assessment “presents a coherent and well-constructed intelligence basis for the case of unprecedented Russian interference.” The senators also found that “the differing confidence levels on one analytic judgment are justified and properly represented.”
The Senate findings clashed with a 2018 report from the House Intelligence Committee, chaired at the time by then-Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), which concluded that “the majority of the Intelligence Community Assessment judgments on Russia’s election activities employed proper analytic tradecraft” but the “judgments on Putin’s strategic intentions did not.” The House report said it “identified significant intelligence tradecraft failings that undermine confidence in the ICA judgments regarding Putin’s strategic objectives.” That report was not bipartisan.
A two-year investigation by Justice Department special counsel Robert Mueller “did not establish” any criminal Trump-Russia collusion. In addition, DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz found huge flaws with the FBI’s investigation, including criticizing the “central and essential” role of the Steele dossier in the FBI’s politicized surveillance of former Trump campaign associate Carter Page.
A report by DOJ special counsel John Durham concluded in 2023 that “neither U.S. law enforcement nor the Intelligence Community appears to have possessed any actual evidence of collusion in their holdings at the commencement of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation.”
Durham also said the “FBI ignored the fact that at no time before, during, or after Crossfire Hurricane were investigators able to corroborate a single substantive allegation in the Steele dossier reporting.”
The Durham report also found that the bureau’s rush to investigate Trump was “markedly different from the FBI’s actions with respect to other highly significant intelligence it received from a trusted foreign source pointing to a Clinton campaign plan to vilify Trump by tying him to Vladimir Putin.”
Brennan briefed then-President Barack Obama, then-Vice President Joe Biden, and other top Obama officials on what Durham dubbed the “Clinton Plan intelligence” in the summer of 2016. The intelligence concerned the purported “approval by Hillary Clinton on July 26, 2016, of a proposal from one of her foreign policy advisers” to “stir up a scandal” against Trump by “tying him” to “Putin and the Russian hacking of the Democratic National Committee.”
Durham noted that “it was also of enough importance for the CIA to send a formal written referral memorandum” in early September 2016 to Comey and discredited FBI special agent Peter Strzok for their consideration and action, asking them to look into claims that Clinton had approved a plan concerning Trump and Russia “as a means of distracting the public from her use of a private mail server.”
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Jerry Dunleavy is a reporter for Just the News.
The post Ratcliffe’s Scathing Review Finds John Brennan Pushed to Include Steele Dossier in 2016 Assessment first appeared on The Arizona Sun Times.
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