Newly released documents show former Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) John Brennan included the now-debunked Steele dossier in the 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) despite warnings from intelligence experts that the dossier was flawed. The dossier was later used as the basis to launch the Russia collusion hoax.
Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard declassified a 2020 report by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence showing — among other things — that members of the intelligence community were concerned with several aspects of the ICA.
According to the newly declassified report, “CIA analysts and operations officers struggled to explain how the ICA … could have included dossier information without identifying and vetting primary sources and without explaining the political circumstances surrounding why the report was produced and funded.”
The dossier in question is the Steele dossier. Hillary Clinton’s campaign hired opposition research firm Fusion GPS to dig up dirt on Trump. Former British spy Christopher Steele, working on behalf of Fusion GPS, compiled opposition research that was pushed by the left as credible despite widespread concerns within the intelligence community about its credibility, according to the newly declassified report. The dossier was then shopped to the FBI and other intelligence agencies and used to push the Russia collusion hoax.
“The ICA sourcing errors involving the dossier violated so many ICD 203 directives, that the text would normally not have passed first-line supervisor review at CIA, FBI or other IC agencies,” the declassified report states. “Moreover, the dossier made outlandish claims and was written in an amateurish conspiracy and political propaganda tone that invited skepticism, if not ridicule, over its content.”
Two senior CIA officers contended that the dossier should have been omitted from the ICA “because it failed to meet basic tradecraft standards,” a senior officer at the meeting said, according to the report.
But according to the same senior officer, Brennan, when “confronted with the dossier’s many flaws,” said, “Yes, but doesn’t it ring true?”
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The report further states that “every CIA analyst and operations officer” asked about the dossier made sure to “emphasize that they had nothing to do with the decision to include Annex A” and could not “vouch” for it. A senior analyst at the FBI said the CIA did not want to include the dossier because the agency was “not comfortable with the sourcing.”
According to the report, the ICA “misrepresented both the significance and credibility of the dossier reports.”
While the ICA found that Russian President Vladimir Putin did order “cyber influence operations” and tried to “undermine faith in the US democratic process,” the determination that Putin preferred then-candidate Donald Trump “did not adhere to the tenets of the ICD [Intelligence Community Directive] standards,” according to the report.
The ICA, as The Federalist’s Mollie Hemingway noted, included a “‘key judgment’ … that Russia had interfered in the election specifically because Putin and the Russian government ‘aspired to help President-elect Trump’s election chances.’”
In light of the newly declassified details, the Department of Justice’s decision to conduct a criminal investigation into Brennan and former FBI Director James Comey may just be the bare minimum in restoring credibility to the intelligence community.
Brianna Lyman is an elections correspondent at The Federalist. Brianna graduated from Fordham University with a degree in International Political Economy. Her work has been featured on Newsmax, Fox News, Fox Business and RealClearPolitics. Follow Brianna on X: @briannalyman2
