Under Trump, the CIA is still covering up its Russiagate fraud

A new CIA review faults top Obama intelligence officials for "procedural anomalies", while ignoring the core deceit in their allegations of "Russian interference."

(Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

Since his first term in the White House, President Donald Trump has promised accountability for Russiagate, the manufactured controversy in which the Hillary Clinton campaign and national security officials framed Trump and his associates as conspirators with Moscow.

Despite investigations in all branches of government, Trump has yet to deliver. The most thorough probe, launched in Trump’s first term by Special Counsel John Durham and concluding in 2023, faulted the FBI for relying on the Clinton-funded collection of conspiracy fiction known as the “Steele dossier” and other compromised material in a baseless hunt for Trump-Russia collusion. Yet Durham only brought two cases to trial against relatively minor actors, both of which ended in acquittals. Instead of wielding his subpoena power, Durham let many of Russiagate’s main principals ignore his requests for an interview. And while he exposed new malfeasance behind the Trump-Russia conspiracy theory, Durham left unscathed the companion, equally dubious allegation that Russia waged a “sweeping and systematic” campaign, as Robert Mueller and a legion of credulous media outlets put it, to sway the 2016 campaign in Trump’s favor.

Durham’s timidity on that latter front was especially derelict given the fact that his office obtained evidence that freshly exposed “Russian interference” as yet another Clinton campaign-generated deceit, as I reported in June 2023. Along with every other investigation and establishment media outlet, Durham also ignored the admission under oath that CrowdStrike – another Clinton campaign contractor relied on by the FBI, and the source for the foundational allegation that Russia stole Democratic Party emails and gave them to Wikileaks to help Trump -- in fact “did not have concrete evidence” of Russian hacking.

A new review ordered by Trump’s CIA Director, John Ratcliffe, follows in the tepid, half-baked record of Russiagate accountability to date.

The CIA examined the “Intelligence Community Assessment” (ICA), released in January 2017, which asserted with “high confidence” that Russia conducted a sweeping 2016 election influence campaign to install Trump in the White House. Rushed for publication in the last days of the Obama administration and drafted under the close watch of then-CIA director John Brennan, the ICA report cast Trump’s election victory as the product of a Kremlin plot, setting off the all-consuming Russia-frenzy that engulfed his presidency and further poisoned Washington-Moscow relations.

The CIA’s new review, conducted by the Directorate of Analysis, does not challenge the ICA’s core allegation of a Russian influence campaign targeting the 2016 election. Overall, the CIA now concludes, the ICA employed “strong adherence to tradecraft standards,” and displayed “analytic rigor exceeded that of most IC [Intelligence Community] assessments.”

Having accepted the ICA’s premise at face value, the CIA review only faults the agency for “procedural anomalies” on reaching one particular judgment – that Russian President Vladimir Putin, in launching his alleged influence campaign, “aspired” for Trump to win. On this front, the CIA concludes, the ICA erred by relying on a single source as opposed to broader corroboration.

The review also endorses critiques that have been identified for years, including in my articles on the topic, that the ICA suffered from “a highly compressed production timeline, stringent compartmentation, and excessive involvement of agency heads” – a reference to Brennan, FBI Director Jim Comey, and ODNI chief James Clapper. Despite subsequent denials, the report makes clear that Brennan and his colleagues pushed to include the fraudulent, Clinton-funded “Steele dossier” in the ICA report. The FBI was in fact so bullish on Steele’s collusion fantasies that its “leadership made it clear that their participation in the ICA hinged on the Dossier’s inclusion,” the review says. This new detail bolsters long-held suspicions from myself and others that, contrary to official denials, the Steele dossier played an instrumental role in the FBI’s decision to launch the Trump-Russia probe in July 2016.

Brennan was another dossier champion. In a December 2016 email, a senior CIA official warned Brennan that including the dossier in any context would taint “the credibility of the entire paper.” But Brennan, the CIA review recounts, “showed a preference for narrative consistency over analytical soundness.” Even shown “specific flaws” in Steele’s work, Brennan “appeared more swayed by the Dossier's general conformity with existing theories than by legitimate tradecraft concerns.” In other words, Brennan, at the time the nation’s most powerful intelligence official – and later an analyst for the chief disseminator of Russiagate propaganda, MSNBC – prioritized his pet conspiracy theory over the basic tenets of his profession. As Brennan wrote to subordinates, “my bottomline is that I believe that the [Steele] information warrants inclusion in the report,” which came in the form of a two-page summary added to the ICA’s annex.

While the heads of both the CIA and FBI rallied behind the Steele dossier, they deliberately excluded critical components of the US intelligence community. “From the outset,” the review notes, “agency heads chose to marginalize the National Intelligence Council (NIC), departing significantly from standard procedures for formal IC assessments.” The review singles out “the complete exclusion of key intelligence agencies,” namely the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and the Department of State’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR). Brennan's decision to “shut out” the DIA and INR “from any participation in such a high-profile assessment about an adversary’s plans and intentions was a significant deviation,” the review says.

As I have previously written, the exclusion of these critical intelligence offices underscores that the ICA, contrary to the prevailing narrative, was not a consensus-based intelligence product on “Russian interference” but a highly politicized hit job. The DIA has a reputation for providing sober assessments resistant to political influence, as declassified reports on the covert US wars in Syria and Ukraine illustrate. Meanwhile, Jack Matlock, the former U.S. Ambassador to Moscow, has claimed that a senior official from INR informed him that it had reached different conclusions about alleged Russian meddling, “but was not allowed to express it.”

The CIA review provides new evidence that Brennan was determined to shut out dissenting views on the core allegation of “Russian interference.” Shortly before intelligence analysts met for the ICA’s lone coordination session, Brennan informed the CIA workforce that he had met with Clapper and Comey. From that meeting, Brennan wrote, “there is strong consensus among us on the scope, nature, and intent of Russian interference in our recent Presidential election.” The CIA review acknowledges that this prematurely declared consensus “risked stifling analytic debate,” but defers to the testimony of the officials “involved in drafting the ICA,” who assured investigators that “they did not feel pressured to reach specific conclusions.” But Brennan had no need to pressure the ICA’s authors, given that he personally “hand-picked” them, according to Clapper’s May 2017 testimony, and closely managed their work product.

Brennan’s enthusiasm for the Steele dossier and the “consensus” on “Russian interference” is fraudulent on its own merits. But it is particularly egregious given that he was made aware of intelligence in July 2016 — days before the FBI’s Russia probe was officially launched — that the Clinton campaign was aiming “to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by the Russian security services,” as he wrote in his own notes. All of Brennan’s subsequent actions indicate that he opted to abet the Clinton plot to frame Trump and Russia, which the CIA review does not mention.

Despite criticizing Brennan and uncovering new details of his biased process, the CIA review’s overall endorsement of the January 2017 ICA’s “strong” tradecraft newly exemplifies that accountability for Russiagate will not emerge from within the intelligence community, even under new leadership. The CIA is not alone in its obduracy. The FBI has long refused to release critical documents used in its probe of alleged Russian interference, including the reports submitted to it by CrowdStrike, the Clinton contractor that initially accused Russia of hacking the DNC and then refused to let the FBI conduct its own forensic investigation of the party’s servers.

To date, the most damning review of Russiagate remains hidden from public view. In March 2018, the House Intelligence Committee (HPSCI), under the leadership of then-Rep. Devin Nunes, produced a report that faulted the ICA for “significant intelligence tradecraft failings that undermine confidence in the ICA judgments.” This included on the core allegation – propagated by Mueller, and untouched by Durham – that Russia hacked the Democratic Party’s emails and gave them to Wikileaks. On that front, HPSCI noted that the ICA's judgments, “particularly on the cyber intrusion sections, employed appropriate caveats on sources and identified assumptions,” – an apparent acknowledgement that intelligence supporting the Russian hacking allegations was far from conclusive.

As part of their review of the ICA, HPSCI staffers produced a still-classified document that fleshed out the ICA's “tradecraft failings” in greater detail. One of the chief authors of that report was Kash Patel, who now serves as Trump’s FBI Director. In a 2021 interview with me, Patel detailed his failed effort to release that report in the final days of Trump’s first term, and how Trump instead bowed to pressure from top officials including then-CIA Director Gina Haspel. Not only did the CIA block the report’s release, but they successfully obtained sole possession of it – keeping it under lock and key inside the agency’s Langley headquarters.

“I think there were people within the IC [Intelligence Community], at the heads of certain intelligence agencies, who did not want their tradecraft called out, even though it was during a former administration, because it doesn't look good on the agency itself,” Patel told me.

Although the CIA successfully buried that HPSCI report in Trump’s first term, that could change in his second. In a new letter, the current HPSCI chair, Rep. Rick Crawford, urged Trump to help HPSCI regain access to its 2018 report and prepare it for public declassification. The new CIA review, Crawford added, is a “whitewash.”

Although Trump’s allies have accurately cast the “Russia hoax” as a campaign against him and his associates, the consequences go far beyond partisan politics. Russiagate was an unprecedented intrusion by unelected national security state officials not only into the electoral process, but into the foreign policy of the elected president that it produces. Most consequentially, by accusing Moscow of a nefarious “election interference” campaign and incentivizing Trump to adopt hawkish policies that would dispel allegations of Russian influence, Russiagate fueled the post-2014 proxy war in Ukraine. The new focus on Russiagate comes as Trump struggles to fulfill yet another signature vow: brokering peace between Kyiv and Moscow. If Trump can make progress on his longstanding promise to expose the fraud behind Russiagate, perhaps that will make it easier to end the war that it helped produce.