New CIA Director Says the Evidence Didn’t Support John Brennan’s Explosive Trump-Russia Assessment

(RealClear Investigations)—Though even Donald Trump’s harshest critics now concede he may not be the “Russian agent” they once speculated he was, the consensus among Washington’s elite remains that he’s a beneficiary of Kremlin skullduggery.

This persistent belief springs from a January 2017 U.S. intelligence document crafted by the Obama administration, which classified the sourcing behind it at the highest levels.

Known as an intelligence community assessment (ICA) and titled “Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent U.S. Elections,” its unclassified finding that Russian President Vladimir Putin interfered in the 2016 election to help Trump win has gone largely unquestioned by the Washington media and by Democrats and Republicans alike. They’ve accepted its conclusion that Putin abetted Trump as incontrovertible fact, and many suspect he continues to cast a spell over the now-reelected president.

Hillary Clinton still blames her 2016 loss on Putin. She’s asserted, “There’s no doubt in my mind [that Putin] wanted me to lose and wanted Trump to win,” echoing the ICA’s judgments, which she and other leading Democrats continue to cite to explain Trump’s ascendency.

But former intelligence czar John Ratcliffe has seen the evidence underlying the ICA, and is not convinced it supports that conclusion. His skepticism, reported here for the first time, appears in written testimony he submitted to the Senate in advance of his confirmation hearing for CIA director.

Ratcliffe was confirmed last Thursday as Trump’s nod for the top Langley job.

In a pre-hearing questionnaire obtained by RealClearInvestigations, Senate Democrats asked Ratcliffe, “Do you agree with the ICA’s judgments,” specifically that “Putin’s goals in influencing the 2016 presidential election included ‘denigrat[ing] Secretary Clinton, and harm[ing] her electability and potential presidency’ ”?

They also asked Ratcliffe if he concurred with the ICA’s finding that “Putin and the Russian government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump.”

Ratcliffe answered that after reviewing the ICA’s underlying intel, including sources and methods, he could only agree that “Russia’s goal was to undermine confidence in U.S. democratic institutions and sow division among the American people,” according to page 38 of the document.

He noted that “Russian social media campaigns included efforts to both support and criticize candidate Trump as well as candidate Clinton, further suggesting an overarching goal of promoting discord.” In other words, he saw no concrete evidence to support a plot by Putin to side with Trump against Clinton.

In the questionnaire, Ratcliffe also pointed out that Moscow has “long used” propaganda, disinformation, and cyberattacks to target not only U.S. elections but also those in other Western democracies, implying its 2016 influence operation was nothing new.

Ratcliffe saw for himself the underlying evidence while acting as Trump’s director of the Office of National Intelligence.

In 2020, he discovered a CIA document from 2016 stating that Clinton, in July of that year, had approved “a plan” by her foreign policy adviser, Jake Sullivan, to create a scandal tying Trump to Putin and the alleged Russian hacking of the Democratic National Committee. The CIA material seemed to contradict the findings of the ICA, prepared and widely disseminated just months later by his predecessor John Brennan, who, as Barack Obama’s CIA director, was tasked after Trump’s surprise victory to assess Russia’s role in the election.

Raising more alarms, Brennan had attached as an annex to the ICA false rumors about Trump and Putin conspiring during the election, plucked from a political dossier underwritten by the Clinton campaign.

Suspicious, Ratcliffe decided to look deeper into how the ICA was developed, according to his Senate confirmation testimony.

“I requested a briefing from the CIA from some members of the team that were involved in that,” he said.

After interviewing CIA analysts who helped draft the ICA and examining the underlying intelligence, he reached different conclusions. Ratcliffe’s review found the evidence was much weaker than Brennan had claimed and did not support his explosive judgments about Putin and Trump.

This flies in the face of what the public has been told about one of the most consequential pieces of intelligence in modern American history.

By painting Trump as a Trojan Horse for Putin, the ICA triggered years-long investigations by a special counsel and by both the Senate and House intelligence committees. It also provided the foundation for thousands of Russiagate articles questioning the patriotism, credibility, and legitimacy of the Trump presidency, including stories that won a Pulitzer Prize for both the Washington Post and the New York Times.

In her witness testimony, Trump aide Hope Hicks told Special Counsel Robert Mueller that the ICA report was viewed internally as the then-president’s “Achilles’ heel” because even if the Russiagate “collusion” scandal were a hoax, “people would think Russia helped him win, taking away from what he had accomplished.”

Aside from Ratcliffe’s startling new disclosure, the national media have ignored several red flags about the ICA’s spycraft and even gone along with demonstrably false spin about its veracity and dependability. For example:

• Despite widespread press accounts that the report reflected the consensus view of “all 17 U.S. intelligence agencies,” it was rushed out in just a few weeks by a tightly controlled group of CIA analysts led by Brennan, who only consulted with the FBI and National Security Agency.
• Yet even the NSA, which intercepts signals intel from Moscow and monitors the communications of Russian officials, dissented from the key judgment that Putin plotted to install Trump as president. And Brennan had to convince a highly skeptical FBI Director James Comey to join that judgment.
• Two agencies specializing in Russian intelligence – the State Department and the Defense Intelligence Agency – were never consulted.
• Brennan dismissed input from experts from the CIA’s own Russia House, a unit within Langley officially called the Mission Center for Europe and Eurasia that for decades had been locked in battle with Russian intelligence. When two senior managers from Russia House visited Brennan in his office to tell him they agreed with the NSA, the then-CIA director overruled them, arguing that they were not privy to all the intelligence that he had seen.
• In another significant departure from previous intelligence assessments, the ICA did not attach an annex with dissenting views.
• It did, however, attach material from a political campaign dossier – a first – which happened to support Brennan’s findings that Putin ordered the influence effort with the aim of defeating Clinton and electing Trump. A summary of the Clinton-paid, so-called Steele dossier was included as a two-page annex.

The report of Special Counsel John Durham on the origins of the FBI’s Trump-Russia probe would later shred every allegation from the dossier, one by one, using subpoenaed emails, texts, and phone records to prove they were all simply made up by Clinton advisers and paid opposition researchers. None of the information actually came from Kremlin sources, yet Brennan still included it as part of the ICA, not knowing that Clinton’s secret role in it would be uncovered years later. At the time, the dossier was deceptively referred to as “Crown material” since it was written by former British spy Christopher Steele.

• The assessment suddenly changed after Trump upset Clinton. Before the election, the intelligence community agreed Russia was merely meddling in the election to create chaos and wasn’t siding with either candidate. But after Trump won, new intelligence emerged claiming Trump was personally aided by Putin, which provided a convenient excuse to explain Clinton’s stunning defeat. It also helped Obama, who endorsed Clinton, to save face after voters effectively repudiated his agenda. He’d assured them Clinton would continue his policies. Again, it was Obama who ordered the hastily drafted assessment.
• And Obama timed the release of the unclassified version of the ICA just two weeks before Trump’s inauguration, knocking his presidency off balance before it could even get started.

Brennan has insisted the ICA didn’t rely on the Clinton campaign’s anti-Trump dossier and that his team obtained separate Russian intelligence that was highly classified and could not be shared publicly.

It wouldn’t be the first time Brennan, a Democrat who openly supported Clinton and previously worked in the White House with Obama, has played politics with U.S. intelligence.

Trump last week stripped Brennan of his top-secret security clearance, arguing he signed an intelligence community letter just weeks before the 2020 election falsely claiming that incriminating emails found on Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop by the New York Post appeared to be Russian disinformation. On MSNBC, Brennan dismissed Trump’s order as part of “his effort to try to get back at those individuals who have criticized him openly and publicly in the past, and I think very legitimately.”

It’s not clear if Ratcliffe plans to declassify the evidence behind the ICA or his review of it. Attempts to reach him were unsuccessful. He said he has not yet briefed the Senate Intelligence Committee about his findings.

But he also testified that what he learned about the ICA’s shoddy spycraft “influence[d]” his move to declassify and release the Brennan memo about Clinton’s plan to stir up a Russia scandal against Trump to the Senate Judiciary Committee in September 2020.

Former CIA analyst Fred Fleitz, who drafted intelligence assessments and Presidential Daily Briefings, said he hopes Ratcliffe issues a report on his own findings so the public can see how the Obama administration “cooked up” the anti-Trump intelligence judgments in the assessment.

“There should be an unclassified report on how the ICA was drafted, who drafted it, and objections by certain IC agencies and CIA officers that were excluded,” Fleitz said in an RCI interview.

Ratcliffe’s revelation undercuts the prevailing narrative that Putin has been meddling in U.S. elections to help Trump and to shape U.S. foreign policy, particularly as it pertains to the war in Ukraine. The Washington press corps, which essentially has staked its reputation on this narrative, continues to beat the drums.

The Atlantic, for instance, ran an article this month – and before Ratcliffe’s confirmation hearings – confidently assuming that even Trump’s “partisan” pick for the CIA would have to go along with the “unanimous, unclassified assessment on Russian election interference in 2016.”

“Ratcliffe has never said publicly whether he agrees with one of its key findings: that the Russians were trying to help Trump win,” wrote Atlantic staffer Shane Smith, who previously covered Russiagate for the Washington Post. “But his silence is telling.”

Of course, the new CIA director has since broken his silence and revealed information that is inconvenient for many in the media who still hold fast to the Trump-Russia storyline. Things could get more inconvenient as Obama-era intelligence is finally declassified.