By Ivan Pentchoukov
Contribuiting Writer
The Trump administration released three batches of records in July that shed new light on the decade-long controversy over Russia’s alleged meddling in the 2016 presidential election.
The three lots of records concern the creation, at the behest of President Barack Obama, of an intelligence community assessment that featured an allegation that Russian President Vladimir Putin interfered in the presidential election in order to help then-candidate Donald Trump.
The public release of the assessment on Jan. 6, 2017, sparked a media wildfire that consumed the early days of the Trump presidency and fed the political controversy that led to the appointment of special counsel Robert Mueller. The sprawling Russia collusion inquiry hamstrung the Trump administration for years before Mueller ended the probe. Mueller concluded that there was no collusion.
The release of the records this month has created a political flashpoint of its own, as Trump has accused Obama of treason and Obama has issued a rare public statement to dismiss the claims.
The Department of Justice has subsequently formed a task force to review the records to determine whether any crimes were committed. Meanwhile, more whistleblowers are coming forward, emboldened by the release of the records, according to Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard.
Here is a summary of the revelations from the documents.
Steele Dossier
Then-CIA Director John Brennan testified under oath to Congress in 2017 that the infamous Steele dossier “was not in any way used as a basis for the intelligence community assessment that was done.”
But according to two of the records released this month, the CIA director overruled those who objected to the inclusion of the Steele dossier in the ICA.
The Steele dossier, which has since been debunked, was paid for by Hillary Clinton’s campaign and composed by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele.
The dossier was cited in the main body of the assessment, and a summary of it was included in the highest-classification version of the dossier that was used to brief both Trump and Obama.
“The ICA authors and multiple senior CIA managers — including the two senior leaders of the CIA mission center responsible for Russia — strongly opposed including the dossier, asserting that it did not meet even the most basic tradecraft standards,” a CIA note released by Director John Ratcliffe on July 2 states.
In the note, the CIA’s deputy director for analysis warned the CIA director that including the dossier in any form risked undermining “the credibility of the entire paper.”
However, Brennan ordered that the dossier remain in the assessment and wrote, “My bottom line is that I believe that the information warrants inclusion in the report.”
Brennan, responding to the releases of the records in an interview with MSNBC on July 24, alleged there was a political motivation to the recent disclosures.
“So they keep saying these things, making these allegations that are without foundation at all, and claiming that there was this vast conspiracy — that we were, in fact, deceiving the American people and engaged in this coup,” Brennan, who is now an MSNBC analyst, told host Jen Psaki.
According to the House Intelligence Committee report on the ICA, every CIA analyst interviewed by the lawmakers believed the dossier should not have been included in the assessment.
While the CIA officers pushed back against including the Steele dossier, FBI leadership pushed to inject it, including by threatening to remove the bureau from the assessment if the dossier was not included, according to the CIA note.
The decision to include the dossier was ultimately made by the heads of the CIA and FBI, according to the House report.
‘Scant, Unclear, Unverifiable’
Another newly declassified record, the House Intelligence Committee report on the ICA, released by Gabbard on July 23, found a host of other issues with the preparation of the intelligence assessment.
Although the committee found that most of the judgments in the ICA were sound, it concluded there were significant failures with the assessment that Putin “developed a clear preference for candidate Trump” and “aspired to help his chances of victory.”
That judgment violated six analytics standards by failing to “properly describe quality and credibility of underlying sources” and not remaining “independent of political considerations,” among other issues, the committee found.
At the time of the release of the report, the House Intelligence Committee was headed by Republicans and chaired by Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif.
The committee’s central finding focuses on what it described as three “substandard” intelligence reports underlying the assessment that Putin interfered in the election to help Trump.
The committee report described the single piece of classified evidence for the allegation as “one scant, unclear, and unverifiable fragment of a sentence from one of the substandard reports.”
The three reports were published internally after the 2016 election, even though a veteran CIA officer judged them to be “unclear, of uncertain origin, potentially biased, implausible, or in the words of senior operations officers, ‘odd.’”
The sentence in question stated, “Putin had made this decision [to leak DNC emails] after he had come to believe that the Democratic nominee had better odds of winning the U.S. presidential election, and that [candidate Trump], whose victory Putin was counting on, most likely would not be able to pull off a convincing victory.”
Describing the fragment, “whose victory Putin was counting on,” one senior CIA operations officer said: “We don’t know what was meant by that. … Five people read it five ways.”
The House Intelligence Committee report states: “The significance of this fragment to the ICA case that Putin ‘aspired’ for candidate Trump to win cannot be overstated. The major ‘high confidence’ judgment of the ICA rests on one opinion about a text fragment with uncertain meaning, that may be a garble, and for which it is not clear how it was obtained.”
CIA officers left the fragment out of the initial draft of the assessment published on Dec. 20, 2016, but they were overruled by the CIA director, who ordered the fragment published in the version dated Dec. 28, 2016.
The human source of the report that featured this fragment had a known strong dislike of Putin and Trump, according to CIA officers. That context was not featured in the final assessment.
In interpreting the fragment, the CIA analysts failed to offer alternative plausible explanations, the report states. For example, that “Putin was counting on” Trump to win could have meant that “Putin expected” Trump to win.
“Given the importance of this major judgment, policymaker readers deserved to know of all viable alternative interpretations of the unclear fragment,” the report states.
In addition to including the allegation based on the fragment, the assessment ran afoul of analytic standards by stating that the intelligence community had “high confidence” in the conclusion. Internal guidance on confidence assessments states that making a high-confidence judgment requires “high-quality information from multiple sources.”
National Security Administration Director Michael Rogers told the committee that the evidence ultimately boiled down to a “source that did not have direct access.”
The committee’s report deemed two more reports substandard.
CIA professionals originally declined to internally publish the second report, describing it as “odd” and “lacking authoritativeness.” According to the House findings, the CIA director intervened to ensure its publication.
In the ICA, this second report was used as the source of the first bullet point in the list of evidence for Putin’s preference for Trump, which stated that “as early as February 2016, a Russian political expert possessed a plan that recommended engagement with [Trump’s] team because of the prospects for improved US-Russian relations.”
The assessment “[failed] to clarify that ‘the plan’ was just an email with no date, no identified sender, no clear recipient, and no classification,” the House Intelligence Committee report stated.
The source for the second report likewise had a known anti-Trump bias.
The third substandard report featured a source who was ultimately unknown and who made the claim that “several members of Putin’s inner circle strongly preferred Republican over Democratic candidates.” Brennan ordered the internal publication of the report over the objections of CIA professionals.
The use of the third report was questioned because the CIA was in possession of reliable intelligence that contradicted the finding that Russia preferred Republican candidates. The committee found that the ICA “falsely claimed that the third substandard report was corroborated by a body of other reporting.” Investigators followed every citation and found that none supported the claim.
In addition to the questionable sourcing for the claim that Putin wanted to help Trump, the ICA failed to include intelligence that Russia did not publish material that would have been damaging to the Democrats and the Clinton campaign.
Although the assessment mentioned that Russia withheld some material on Clinton’s health, the report said it failed to state that the information withheld was described as far more damaging than what was leaked.
“It is difficult to justify the ICA judgment that Putin ‘aspired’ to help Trump win by discrediting Secretary Clinton, given that in the closing weeks of the campaign — when such devastating leaks could have been decisive — President Putin elected not to inject this material into the campaign,” the House Intelligence report states.
‘Compressed Timeline’
The CIA memo released earlier this month summarizes the findings of the tradecraft review of the 2016 ICA.
The review identified several “procedural anomalies” in the preparation of the assessment, including “a highly compressed production timeline, stringent compartmentation, and excessive involvement of agency heads.”
Obama ordered the creation of the assessment on Dec. 6, 2016, and said it should be released to the public before the end of his term on Jan. 20, 2017. Intelligence officials subsequently moved up the deadline to Jan. 6, the day Congress was set to certify Trump’s election victory.
According to the CIA, a formal assessment can take months to prepare, but the authors assigned by the CIA were given a week to draft the document and two days to coordinate with the rest of the intelligence community before the document entered final review on Dec. 20, 2016.
“Multiple [intelligence community] stakeholders said they felt ‘jammed’ by the compressed timeline. Most got their first look at the hard-copy draft and underlying sensitive reporting just before or at the only in-person coordination meeting that was held on 19 December to conduct a line-by-line review,” the CIA note states.
“Following the coordination meeting, then-Director of the National Security Agency Mike Rogers wrote to Brennan to say that his analysts were not ‘fully comfortable’ with the time they had been given to ’review all of the intelligence‘ and ‘be absolutely confident in their assessments.’”
The memo concluded that the rushed timeline was not justified, given that the election was over and the scramble to prepare the report invited the question whether the Obama White House acted with a political motive.
Addressing the timeline, the House Intelligence Committee report said that all five of the CIA analysts assigned to work on the report “expressed their astonishment to the committee that the management made no significant changes to their draft during the review process, something unheard of for such a high-profile paper.”
A single highly classified document was the basis for the judgment that Putin “aspired” to help Trump win, according to the CIA note.
One CIA manager said that the highly classified nature of the underlying intelligence added to an already chaotic process. Key analysts weren’t cleared to view the intelligence and were forced to work with out-of-context portions of the draft, the memo says.
The CIA review also found the involvement of agency heads in the preparation of the assessment to be problematic. Some analytic managers opted out of the process because of the “atypical prominence of agency leadership in the process.”
Brennan cut out the National Intelligence Council from the drafting of the assessment, according to the CIA note. The council, which usually leads the assignments for such a project, did not receive a copy of the assessment until hours before its publication.
Jan. 6 Deadline
Obama administration officials pushed for the ICA on Russia’s interference in the U.S. election to be completed and released to the public by Jan. 6, 2017, according to a batch of emails and records declassified by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence on July 18.
Obama set a Jan. 20, 2017, deadline for the public release.
The House Intelligence Committee report on the ICA found that the rushed release before Trump’s inauguration suggested that the work schedule “was driven by a political motivation to ensure the ICA was rolled out to the Congress and world media by the outgoing administration.”
The House report states that the timeline gave the CIA director an opportunity to “control the narrative” in briefings to Congress.
Congress certified Trump’s election victory on Jan. 6, 2017. During the certification session, several House Democrats cited Russian interference in the election when challenging slates of electors. No objections were sustained because none of the Senate Democrats supported the objections.
‘Low Confidence’ on Culprit of DNC Leak
The FBI and the National Security Agency, in the heat of the 2016 election, dissented from an ICA that found Russia was behind the leak of more than 19,000 emails from the Democratic National Committee.
The FBI and NSA instead had “low confidence” in the attribution to Russia, according to a Sept. 12, 2016, ICA, which was released by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence on July 18.
“FBI and NSA, however, have low confidence in the attribution of the data leaks to Russia,” the 2016 assessment states. “They agree that the disclosures appear consistent with what we might expect from Russian influence activities but note that we lack sufficient technical details to correlate the information posted online to Russian state-sponsored actors.”
A memo prepared for Obama, dated two days after the September 2016 assessment, blames Russia for the hack and leak and does not mention the dissent by the FBI and NSA, according to the newly released documents.
The FBI’s low confidence in the allegation that Russia was behind the email release is significant because the bureau had received, three weeks before dissenting from the assessment, the final report on the hack by CrowdStrike, a private cybersecurity firm hired by the DNC to remediate the hack in the spring of 2016.
The CrowdStrike reports have never been made public. The company’s president at the time, Shawn Henry, told the House Intelligence Committee in late 2017 that his firm had no evidence that files were stolen from the DNC systems.
