Federalist

by Mollie Hemingway (assisted by Margot Cleveland)

Top officials working on an intelligence community analysis about Russia’s interference in the 2016 election were overruled by CIA Director John Brennan, according to records exclusively reviewed by The Federalist. The records are related to ongoing criminal investigations into Brennan and other top intelligence officials for their roles in launching the Russia collusion hoax.

The dispute was over the “key judgment” in a January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) that Russia had interfered in the election specifically because Putin and the Russian government “aspired to help President-elect Trump’s election chances.”

The senior intelligence officials pointed out the lack of evidence to substantiate the claim. “We have no intelligence to directly support this ‘aspiration’ point,” said one member of the small group of individuals working with Brennan, FBI Director James Comey, and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper on the assessment of Russian activity in the lead-up to the 2016 election.

[. . .]

The experts did not disagree that Russia had continued its practice of attempting to sow chaos in presidential elections. They believed the intelligence indicated Russia sought to weaken presumptive winner Hillary Clinton and those efforts may have indirectly helped Trump. But they were concerned about the lack of evidence for the claim that became a cornerstone of the Russia collusion narrative, in which Trump was accused of conspiring with Russia to steal the 2016 election.

“Can you really prove Moscow was trying to get Trump elected?” the official asked in late December 2016.

Brennan called the dissenting individuals into his office on Dec. 30, 2016, and had a lengthy meeting in which they articulated their serious concerns. “The assessment will stay the same,” Brennan reported at the end of the meeting.

The paper trail about this dispute posed a problem for Brennan, who had presented the information as being universally held with a high degree of confidence. The CIA review noted that the key judgment was given a “higher confidence level than was justified.” It further noted the ICA had been drafted under an unusually rushed timeline, had been preceded by leaks to The Washington Post and New York Times improperly claiming “definitive conclusions” had already been reached, and had indications of a “potential political motive.”

Brennan later threw the dissenting officials under the bus when he recounted the events. Explaining his decision to ignore the concerns of the career intelligence experts, he said, “I came to the conclusion that the two officers had not read all the available intelligence,” Brennan wrote in his 2020 book Undaunted, of his decision to keep the key judgment despite the concerns.

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