A newly released CIA review reveals that top Obama administration intelligence officials deliberately corrupted the 2016 intelligence assessment on Russian election interference through unprecedented manipulation and rushed procedures designed to undermine Donald Trump’s presidency.
“All the world can now see the truth,” CIA Director John Ratcliffe said of the report on X.
The internal CIA review found that then-CIA Director John Brennan, FBI Director James Comey and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper orchestrated an “atypical” and “markedly unconventional” process that raised serious questions about political motives behind the intelligence community assessment.
Career professionals at the CIA’s Directorate of Analysis conducted the review after Ratcliffe commissioned the investigation in May.
The assessment examined the Intelligence Community Assessment that concluded Russian President Vladimir Putin “aspired” to help Trump win the 2016 election.
Barack Obama ordered the assessment on December 6, 2016, just six weeks before his presidency ended.
The rushed timeline and unusual procedures employed by intelligence leaders violated standard protocols and compromised analytical integrity, according to the review.
The investigation identified “multiple procedural anomalies” that undermined the credibility of the original assessment.
These included a “highly compressed production timeline, stringent compartmentation, and excessive involvement of agency heads” that departed from established intelligence practices.
Brennan handpicked analysts to compile the assessment while excluding 13 of the then-17 intelligence agencies from participation.
Only the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, CIA, FBI and NSA contributed to the politically sensitive document.
The review found that Brennan, Comey and Clapper’s “direct engagement in the ICA’s development was highly unusual in both scope and intensity” and “risked stifling analytic debate.”
Their involvement altered normal review processes and compromised analytical rigor.
Intelligence officials sidelined the National Intelligence Council, which typically maintains control over drafting assignments and coordination for formal intelligence assessments.
The NIC received the final draft only hours before publication, departing significantly from standard procedures.
Brennan forced inclusion of the discredited Steele dossier despite strong objections from CIA authors and senior Russia experts.
The Deputy Director for Analysis warned Brennan that including the dossier “risked the credibility of the entire paper.”
The Steele dossier, a salacious opposition research product funded by Hillary Clinton’s campaign, contained unsubstantiated claims about Russian blackmail material on Trump.
Multiple senior CIA managers opposed its inclusion, asserting it failed to meet basic tradecraft standards.
Brennan overruled these objections, responding that he believed “the information warrants inclusion in the report.”
The review criticized his “preference for narrative consistency over analytical soundness” when confronted with specific flaws in the dossier.
FBI leadership made their participation in the assessment conditional on the dossier’s inclusion.
They repeatedly pushed to weave references throughout the main body of the assessment, according to the review.
The compressed timeline created numerous challenges for intelligence professionals.
CIA’s primary authors had less than a week to draft the assessment and less than two days to coordinate with intelligence community peers before formal review began.
Intelligence community stakeholders reported feeling “jammed” by the compressed timeline. Most received their first look at the draft and underlying sensitive reporting just before or during the only in-person coordination meeting held on December 19.
The review noted that media leaks before work began on the assessment “risked creating an anchoring” effect.
This psychological term suggests the leaks may have influenced analysts to conform their findings to the leaked narrative rather than conducting objective analysis.
The New York Post highlighted that both the Washington Post and New York Times reported on December 9, 2016, that the intelligence community had “concluded with high confidence that Russia had intervened specifically to help Trump win the election.”
The Washington Post cited an unnamed official describing this as the intelligence community’s “consensus view.”
The politically charged environment led some CIA analytic managers to opt out of the review process entirely. One manager involved noted that others “who would typically have been part of the review chain” chose not to participate due to the unusual prominence of agency leadership.
The review concludes that several aspects of tradecraft rigor were compromised, particularly in supporting the judgment that Putin “aspired” to help Trump win.
The two senior leaders of the CIA mission center responsible for Russia argued jointly against including this judgment.
In an email to Brennan on December 30, these Russia experts stated the judgment should be removed because it was “both weakly supported and unnecessary.”
They warned that including it would “open up a line of very politicized inquiry.”
The assessment’s flawed process contributed to the subsequent Mueller investigation, which concluded after two years that no Trump-Russia collusion occurred.
The intelligence community’s seal of approval gave credibility to allegations that dominated Trump’s first presidency.
Ratcliffe characterized the process as Obama administration officials deciding to “screw Trump” by creating an assessment with the “imprimatur of an IC assessment in a way that nobody can question it.”
He described how they “stamped it as Russian collusion and then classified it so nobody could see it.”
The post CIA Review Exposes How Obama Administration Corrupted 2016 Russia Intelligence Assessment to Target Trump: ‘All the World Can Now See the Truth’ appeared first on Resist the Mainstream.
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Author: Jordyn M.
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