A reading of the June 26 eight-page CIA report, called the “Tradecraft Review of the 2016 Intelligence Community Assessment on Russian Election Interference,” reveals a politically motivated hatchet job performed during December 2016, called the “Intelligence Community Assessment on Russian Election Interference.” That infamous report was published in unclassified form in January 2017.
The “Tradecraft Review” (TR) shows that the ICA had violated intelligence standards so as to label Russian President Vladimir Putin as “aspiring” to put Trump into office. This undermined Donald Trump’s election victory in an attempt to lock the U.S. back into the geopolitical confrontation with Russia expected from a Hillary Clinton administration.
TR was commissioned in May by CIA Director John Ratcliffe and completed last week by career professionals at the CIA’s Directorate of Analysis (DA). It names then-CIA Director John Brennan as the key muscle behind the operation. The intelligence community (IC) had little or no involvement in the “assessment,” as the core of the operation was run by Brennan himself, along with the team that he put together in July 2016, after the Clinton campaign had been exposed by Julian Assange. TR states: “The CIA drafters had enjoyed privileged access to this information through participation in a highly compartmented analytic effort— known as the ‘Fusion Cell'—which Brennan had created in July to focus on the IC’s growing concern about Russian election interference. However, most ICA contributors, coordinators, and reviewers were only ‘read-in’ to the sensitive reporting at the 19 December coordination meeting,” the only time they met on the matter.
“From the outset, agency heads chose to marginalize the National Intelligence Council (NIC), departing significantly from standard procedures for formal IC assessments. Typically, the NIC maintains control over drafting assignments, coordination, and review processes. In his book Undaunted, Brennan reveals that he established crucial elements of the process with the White House before NIC involvement, stating he informed them that CIA would ‘take the lead drafting the report.’”
Further, then-FBI Director James Comey was Brennan’s underling in the operation. On the British-intelligence-compiled “Steele Dossier,” that various parts of the IC objected to, TR states: “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….”
In sum, TR reports that 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.”
Ratcliffe posted yesterday on X the link to the New York Post's coverage and stated: “All the world can now see the truth: Brennan, Clapper and Comey manipulated intelligence and silenced career professionals—all to get Trump. Thank you to the career @CIA officers who conducted this review and exposed the facts.”
The New York Post reported yesterday: “The review identified ‘multiple procedural anomalies’ that undermined the credibility of the ICA, including ‘a highly compressed production timeline, stringent compartmentation, and excessive involvement of agency heads.’” Also, the investigation of Trump was “deliberately corrupted by then-CIA Director John Brennan, FBI Director James Comey and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, who were ‘excessively involved’ in its drafting, and rushed its completion in a ‘chaotic,’ ‘atypical’ and ‘markedly unconventional’ process that raised questions of a ‘potential political motive.’ Further, Brennan’s decision to include the discredited Steele dossier, over the objections of the CIA’s most senior Russia experts, ‘undermined the credibility’ of the assessment.”
