On Thursday, CIA Director John Ratcliffe put out a new report to the public, called “Tradecraft Review of the 2016 Intelligence Community Assessment on Russian Election Interference.” The review takes a deep dive into the upper echelon of the CIA and their obsession with creating a narrative that painted then-presidential candidate Donald Trump as working with Russia to influence the election.
It took a look at the involvement of former CIA Director John Brennan, FBI Director James Comey, and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper in making up this load of garbage about Trump and Russia.
One of the passages in the report describes how “excessively involved” former President Barack Obama’s appointees were in creating the first drafts of the initial document, which he claims was rushed to completion in a “chaotic” and “atypical” manner.
via Trending Politics News:
The swift creation of the first Trump-Russia collusion report raised the potential for “potential political motive,” Ratcliffe wrote in a letter releasing his review. Thursday’s report was completed by career agents in the CIA’s Directorate of Analysis and was commissioned by Ratcliffe in May.
A “lessons-learned review” section describes how, six weeks before leaving office, former President Barack Obama ordered the CIA to draft up their assessment of Russia’s involvement in Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton. The report concluded that Russian President Vladimir Putin “aspired” to help Trump win.
“[M]ultiple procedural anomalies” litter the original report and undermine the CIA’s credibility, including a “a highly compressed production timeline, stringent compartmentation, and excessive involvement of agency heads.”
In addition, the Obama CIA’s findings may have been tainted by the exclusion of other law enforcement organizations in its creation, as well as media leaks that may have pressured analysts to conform to narratives in the press.
“The rushed timeline to publish both classified and unclassified versions before the presidential transition raised questions about a potential political motive behind the White House tasking and timeline,” Ratcliffe’s report goes on to explain.
Ratcliffe then discusses the involvement of Brennan, Comey, and Clapper, stating it was “highly unusual in both scope and intensity” and “risked stifling analytic debate.”
Another finding of the report included Brennan keeping 13 out of 17 U.S. intelligence agencies out of the commissioning of the report. He ultimately restricted it to the ODNI, CIA, FBI, and NSA. Hmmm…that’s interesting, right?
“One of the sidelined groups included the National Security Council, and Brennan overrode objections about his including the Steele dossier in a final batch of evidence submitted as part of the probe,” the article read.
“This was Obama, Comey, Clapper and Brennan deciding ‘We’re going to screw Trump,’” said Ratcliffe further elaborated in an exclusive interview with the NY Post. “It was, ‘We’re going to create this and put the imprimatur of an IC assessment in a way that nobody can question it.’ They stamped it as Russian collusion and then classified it so nobody could see it.”
“This led to Mueller [special counsel Robert Mueller’s inquiry, which concluded after two years that there was no Trump-Russia collusion]. It put the seal of approval of the intelligence community that Russia was helping Trump and that the Steele dossier was the scandal of our lifetime. It ate up the first two years of his [Trump’s first] presidency,” he added during the interview. “You see how Brennan and Clapper and Comey manipulated [and] silenced all the career professionals and railroaded the process.”
Ratcliffe then noted that findings reveal despite “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,” Brennan wanted it to be included.
“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 ICA authors first learned of the Dossier, and FBI leadership’s insistence on its inclusion, on December 20 — the same day the largely coordinated draft was entering the review process at CIA,” the review said. “FBI leadership made it clear that their participation in the ICA hinged on the Dossier’s inclusion and, over the next few days, repeatedly pushed to weave references to it throughout the main body of the ICA.”
Trending Politics News concludes by providing the final statements in the review:
“With analysts operating under severe time constraints, limited information sharing, and heightened senior-level scrutiny, several aspects of tradecraft rigor were compromised — particularly in supporting the judgment that Putin ‘aspired’ to help Trump win.”
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