How Intelligence Community Analysis Rules Were Flagrantly Violated in the Fraudulent Russia Collusion Intelligence Assessment

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A bombshell House Intelligence Committee (HPSCI) Majority Staff Report recently released by Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Tulsi Gabbard explains in detail how the rules for drafting intelligence assessments were deliberately ignored to produce a highly politicized Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) in early January 2017, designed to sabotage the first  Trump administration.

Worried about the House report’s clarity and persuasiveness, former Obama officials, former intelligence officials, congressional Democrats, and liberal journalists are desperately trying to discredit this report.

President Obama ordered the ICA, titled “Russia’s Influence Campaign Targeting the 2016 Presidential Election,” during a December 9, 2016, meeting with DNI James Clapper, CIA Director John Brennan, National Security Adviser Susan Rice, Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe, and others. The ICA was issued less than a month later, on January 6, 2017.

Because ICAs are high-profile analyses of significant national security issues that are supposed to reflect the views of all 17 U.S. intelligence agencies, they usually take many months – often over a year – to complete. For this reason, the speed with which this ICA was issued sparked immediate controversy.

The Intelligence Community’s tradecraft standards are guidelines taught to all U.S. intelligence analysts to ensure that their analysis reflects analytic rigor and excellence. The House report explains how these standards were set aside to produce this assessment in less than a month and ensure that it had one preordained conclusion: that Russian President Vladimir Putin wanted Trump to win the 2016 election and that Russia meddled in the election to help Trump win.

Which Intelligence Analysis Rules Were Broken?

The House report found significant violations of the following intelligence tradecraft standards:

• Properly describe the quality and credibility of underlying sources. The ICA violated this requirement by not acknowledging that its key judgments on Putin’s intentions were based on raw intelligence that did not meet tradecraft standards. This included the use of the discredited Steele Dossier in the ICA’s sourcing and misrepresenting the dossier’s credibility and contents.
• Properly express and explain uncertainties associated with major analytic judgments. According to the House report, the ICA’s judgment on Putin’s intentions violated this standard because it was based on a single, unverifiable sentence fragment and was included in the assessment because CIA Director Brennan overruled objections to its inclusion by experienced CIA officers.
• Base confidence assessments on the quantity and quality of source material. The ICA violated this standard by mischaracterizing the above unverifiable sentence fragment as supporting “high confidence” judgments.
• Be informed by all relevant information available. Voluminous and likely relevant intelligence was excluded from consideration in the ICA, according to the House report. This included omitting significant intelligence that contradicted the ICA’s judgment that Putin aspired to help Trump win.
• Consider alternative perspectives and contrary information. In violation of tradecraft standards that require high-profile intelligence assessments to be intelligence community products produced by and fully vetted with all 17 U.S. intelligence agencies, the ICA was written by just five hand-picked CIA analysts, with one principal CIA draftsman. It was also not properly coordinated within the CIA or other intelligence agencies. In addition, the House report found that the ICA used a “single-track hypothesis” on Putin’s intentions regarding the 2016 presidential election that ignored two alternative hypotheses suggested by the intelligence and Russian behavior: that Putin either did not care who won the election or wanted Hillary Clinton to win.
• Be independent of political considerations. The House report cited many violations of this standard. The ICA was produced in less than 30 days and issued two weeks before Donald Trump was sworn in as America’s 45th president. This rushed work schedule suggested it was driven by a political motivation to ensure the ICA was presented to Congress and the media by the outgoing administration, according to the House report. This rushed schedule also allowed outgoing CIA Director Brennan to maintain control of the ICA, to determine who could see the raw intelligence cited in the assessment, and for Brennan to lead briefings to Congress on the ICA.

Dishonest Arguments to Discredit the House Report

To distract from the House report’s findings, some on the left, especially former intelligence officials and the liberal media, have made several dishonest arguments to discredit it.

The most frequently heard argument is that a unanimous bipartisan April 2020 Senate Intelligence Committee report on the Russia collusion hoax and the ICA is more reliable because the ICA’s authors and others involved in its production told Senate investigators that tradecraft rules were followed and there was no political pressure on them to reach specific conclusions. Defenders of the ICA have also asserted that the Senate report is more credible because now-Secretary of State Marco Rubio was the Senate Intelligence Committee chairman when this report was issued.

These criticisms are misleading and false.

First, it was not a surprise that the authors of the ICA, who were hand-picked by former CIA Director Brennan, would defend their work as objective and nonpolitical. However, it is unclear whether other intelligence officers interviewed by the committee’s staff spoke freely and without fear of retaliation.

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