CIA’s historic retraction of intel reports exposes political bias in Obama-Biden spy agencies

Original article here

First there were parents flagged at school board meetings. Then it was Catholics who preferred the traditional Latin Mass who were targeted for scrutiny.

Now, the CIA’s retraction of nineteen “politicized” intel reports on Friday — on the heels of the agency’s self-critique last year on its assessment of Trump-Russia collusion in 2016 — has put the sharpest light yet on the infection of political bias inside American spy agencies dating back to the Obama era.

Historic retractions: “No room for bias”

The CIA announced on Friday that it was retracting or revising nineteen different intelligence reports, dating from 2015 through 2023 — spanning the Obama administration, the first Trump presidency, and the Biden administration. The politicized assessments — many of them focused on DEI-related issues — included pronouncements by the CIA about white women, motherhood, violent extremism, LGBT issues, abortion, and others well beyond the remit of the agency’s mission.

“The intelligence products we released to the American people today — produced before my tenure as DCIA — fall short of the high standards of impartiality that CIA must uphold and do not reflect the expertise for which our analysts are renowned,” Ratcliffe said Friday. “There is absolutely no room for bias in our work and when we identify instances where analytic rigor has been compromised, we have a responsibility to correct the record.”

The CIA’s retractions on Friday are the latest examples of the politicized nature of the intelligence community over the past decade, including a Biden Justice Department  memo aimed at parents protesting at school board meetings, an FBI memo aimed at traditionalist Catholics, an intelligence community assessment that sought to link Trump to Russia, and more.

CIA rescinds nearly two dozen politicized intel assessments

“There is absolutely no room for bias in any kind of the CIA’s work,” a senior CIA official told Just the News on Friday. “So when we find instances where our tradecraft did not reach that high bar of impartiality, we must correct the record. And that’s why we’re taking steps to reinforce analytic integrity by ordering the public release, substantive revision or retraction of these products that do not meet CIA’s tradecraft standards.”

Of the 19 analytical reports, 17 have been permanently deleted and are no longer available for spy agencies to use in their work and two were recalled and revised and then re-released, the official said.

One of the retracted reports was made public by the CIA on Friday from the agency’s Counterterrorism Mission Center, while two of them come from the CIA’s World Intelligence Review (WIRe), which is described as a “daily publication” at the agency and as the “flagship product” of the CIA’s Directorate of Analysis.

“Under prior administrations, there was an inappropriate insertion of DEI issues and other distractions into aspects of CIA’s work, which undercut our mission of providing objective analysis on national security issues,” the senior CIA official said Friday.

One now-retracted intelligence assessment from the CIA from October 2021 – the first year of Biden’s presidency – was titled “Women Advancing White Racially and Ethnically Motivated Violent Extremist Radicalization and Recruitment.” The intelligence product was “produced under the auspices of the Chief of Analysis” at the “Counterterrorism Mission Center.”

The assessment cited a 2021 article by “An Injustice!” – a seemingly defunct radical website hosted by Medium that described itself as “A new intersectional publication, geared towards voices, values, and identities! […] We speak to the intersectionality of identity and share the stories of those who bring all their selves into all their spaces.”

Another retracted CIA intelligence assessment – this one from July 2020 during the final year of Trump’s first term – was part of the CIA’s WIRe reporting. The publication was titled “Worldwide: Pandemic-Related Contraceptive Shortfalls Threaten Economic Development” and took a seemingly pro-abortion tone – including citing pro-abortion sources.

The agency product cited an April 2020 article by the International Planned Parenthood Federation three different times, and the pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute also had articles cited by the CIA product four times.

Another CIA intelligence assessment – from January 2015 during the Obama presidency – was written by the CIA’s “Office of North Africa Arabian Peninsula and Regional Analysis” and was also part of the agency’s WIRe reports. It focused on “Middle East-North Africa: LGBT Activists Under Pressure.”

The CIA analysis also twice cited a Daily Beast article from June 2014 claiming that Egypt was a worse place for gays under Egyptian leader Abdel Fattah El-Sisi than it had been under the rule of the Muslim Brotherhood, a radical Islamist group that has since been designated a terrorist group by the United States.

The senior CIA official insisted Friday that these flawed analyses were “not representative of CIA analysis today.”

Garland’s schools boards memo gets tossed by Bondi

Attorney General Merrick Garland’s October 2021 school boards memo had alleged there had been a “disturbing spike in harassment, intimidation, and threats of violence against school administrators, board members, teachers, and staff who participate in the vital work of running our nation’s public schools.” It said the DOJ will “discourage these threats, identify them when they occur, and prosecute them when appropriate.”

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, revealed whistleblower evidence in November 2021 which indicated that FBI counterterrorism assets and “threat tags” were involved in the investigation of parents protesting school policies.

Jordan released an unclassified internal FBI email at the time showing that the bureau’s counterterrorism chief sent instructions to FBI officials to use a “threat tag” to track any complaints involving parents and school officials.

Attorney General Pam Bondi used a little-noticed footnote to rescind Garland’s memo in February last year.

Bondi wrote that “for the avoidance of doubt, former Attorney General Garland’s October 4, 2021, Memorandum is hereby rescinded.” Garland’s directive was revoked with little fanfare in a memo the day after her confirmation by the Senate.

The Biden-era DOJ memo was prompted in part by a National School Boards Association letter from late September 2021 which had argued to then-President Joe Biden that “the classification of these heinous actions could be the equivalent to a form of domestic terrorism and hate crimes” and called upon the DOJ to review whether the Patriot Act could be deployed.

Internal emails from NSBA itself that were released by the Parents Defending Education activist group show top members of the NSBA had been consulting with the Biden White House about the letter. NSBA President Viola Garcia and Interim Director and CEO Chip Slaven cosigned the letter to Biden.

While Garland’s memo did not mention the National Security Division, which deals with terrorism and other threats, the Biden DOJ’s press release at the time did, naming it as part of a new DOJ “task force” along with representatives from DOJ’s Criminal Division, the Executive Office for U.S. Attorneys, and the FBI.

The Biden DOJ also issued a follow-up directive later in October 2021 which pressured all U.S. Attorneys Offices to convene meetings with local law enforcement and FBI representatives to address the alleged threat posed by parents concerned with what their children were being told and taught.

After a widespread national outcry and amid internal pushback within the organization, the NSBA disavowed its own letter in late October 2021, saying that “we regret and apologize for the letter” and that “there was no justification for some of the language included in the letter.”

Garland initially testified to Congress later that month that the NSBA’s follow-up apology letter did not sway him: “The language in the letter which they disavow is language which was never included in my memo and never would’ve been. I did not adopt every concern that they had in their letter. I adopted only the concern about violence and threats of violence, and that hasn’t changed.”

It took the new Trump DOJ to withdraw Garland’s directive.

Grassley says Wray misled about the FBI’s anti-Catholic memo

An FBI intelligence product released in January 2023 by the bureau’s field office in Richmond, Virginia claimed that the office “assesses the increasingly observed interest of racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists (RMVEs) in radical-traditionalist Catholic (RTC) ideology almost certainly presents opportunities for threat mitigation through the exploration of new avenues for tripwires and source development.”

FBI Richmond said in January 2023 that it “makes this assessment with high confidence based on FBI investigations, local law enforcement agency reporting, and liaison reporting.”

But the FBI’s national press office admitted in February 2023 that “this particular field office product […] does not meet the exacting standards of the FBI” and claimed that “upon learning of the document, FBI Headquarters quickly began taking action to remove the document from FBI systems and conduct a review of the basis for the document.”

The field office’s intelligence product repeatedly cited the left-wing Southern Poverty Law Center, including an article on “Radical Traditional Catholicism.” The Richmond field office also pointed to an Atlantic article on “How Extremist Gun Culture is Trying to Co-Opt the Rosary.” And the local field office had also cited articles by Salon, including “Traditional Catholics and White Nationalist ‘Groypers’ Forge a New Far-Right Youth Movement” and “White Nationalists Get Religion.”

DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz wrote in 2024 that the FBI’s Inspection Division concluded that “there was no evidence of malicious intent or improper purpose” behind the local field office memo, but did note significant problems with it, including that it “failed to adhere to analytic tradecraft standards and evinced errors in professional judgment, including that it lacked sufficient evidence or articulable support for a relationship between RMVEs and so-called RTC ideology; incorrectly conflated the subjects’ religious views with their RMVE activities, creating the appearance that the FBI had inappropriately considered religious beliefs and affiliation as a basis for conducting investigative activity; and reflected a lack of training and awareness concerning proper domestic terrorism terminology.”

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, released FBI records last June which revealed that “the Biden FBI’s anti-Catholic Richmond Memo was widely distributed to over 1,000 FBI employees across the country before it was publicly disclosed by a whistleblower in 2023.”

Grassley’s office said that the senator also “found the FBI produced at least 13 additional documents and five attachments that used anti-Catholic terminology and relied on information from the radical far-left Southern Poverty Law Center.”

The senator also said that “a second FBI memo … was drafted by the FBI Richmond field office for Bureau-wide distribution” and that “the draft memo repeated the unfounded link between traditional Catholicism and violent extremism, but was never published due to backlash following the Richmond Memo’s public disclosure.” Grassley argued that “the existence of this second memo contradicts” testimony by now-former FBI Director Christopher Wray.

“The Richmond product — which was a single product by a single field office — which, as soon as I found out about it, I was aghast, and ordered it withdrawn and removed from FBI systems,” Wray had testified in July 2023.

Grassley sent a letter to current FBI Director Kash Patel in June 2025 raising this concern.

“My investigation has also focused on Director Wray’s misleading testimony on the scope of the memo’s distribution to other FBI field offices … I’ve since learned other field offices provided input into the memo’s production,” Grassley wrote, adding that “testimony calling it the work of a single field office was misleading at best, and appears to be part of a pattern of intentional deception.”

CIA’s “lessons-learned” review harshly criticized Brennan over Steele Dossier

Friday’s retraction of nineteen intelligence assessments by the CIA is not the first time the agency has critiqued its own products during the second Trump administration.

A “lessons learned” review released by the CIA last July criticized then-CIA Director John Brennan for joining the FBI in pushing to include British ex-spy Christopher Steele’s baseless anti-Trump dossier in the 2017 intelligence community assessment on Russia’s alleged meddling in the 2016 election.

The largely declassified eight-page “lessons learned” CIA review from last summer focused on the ICA about Russia and the November 2016 election. It was put together by the CIA’s Directorate of Analysis at Ratcliffe’s direction and concluded that “the decision by agency heads to include the Steele Dossier in the ICA ran counter to fundamental tradecraft principles and ultimately undermined the credibility of a key judgment.”

The CIA review stated that “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 Steele Dossier, asserting that it did not meet even the most basic tradecraft standards.”

The agency review memo also stated that the CIA’s Deputy Director for Analysis warned in a late December 2016 email to Brennan that including the dossier in any form risked “the credibility of the entire paper.”

Yet the CIA review revealed that “despite these objections, Brennan showed a preference for narrative consistency over analytical soundness” and that “when confronted with specific flaws in the Dossier by the two mission center leaders — one with extensive operational experience and the other with a strong analytic background — he appeared more swayed by the Dossier’s general conformity with existing theories than by legitimate tradecraft concerns.” The CIA review memo stated that Brennan ultimately formalized his position in writing, arguing that “my bottomline is that I believe that the information warrants inclusion in the report.”

The CIA memo released last summer also stated that “ultimately, agency heads decided to include a two-page summary of the Dossier as an annex to the ICA” with an accompanying disclaimer stating that the dossier material was not used “to reach the analytic conclusions.” The CIA review memo, however, found that “by placing a reference to the annex material in the main body of the ICA as the fourth supporting bullet for the judgment that Putin ‘aspired’ to help Trump win, the ICA implicitly elevated unsubstantiated claims to the status of credible supporting evidence, compromising the analytical integrity of the judgment.”

Ratcliffe tweeted last summer, in announcing the review being made public, that President Donald Trump “has trusted me with helping to end weaponization of U.S. intelligence” and that “today’s report underscores that the 2016 IC Assessment was conducted through an atypical & corrupt process under the politically charged environments” of Brennan and since-fired FBI Director James Comey.

Just the News reported earlier this week that federal prosecutors who are probing the weaponization of intelligence and law enforcement against Trump and his allies sent a secret and rare request for evidence from the Senate regarding former CIA Director John Brennan, signaling that they are zeroing in on his questionable testimony going back nearly a decade on his now-debunked efforts to tie Trump’s 2016 campaign to collusion with Russia.