A new report from America’s top intelligence agency is revealing corruption and political motivation behind claims of “Russian collusion” in the 2016 presidential election. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Director John Ratcliffe commissioned a tradecraft report examining the 2016 Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) alleging widespread Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, which in turn fueled the narrative that then-president-elect Donald Trump illegally collaborated with Russian operatives in order to defeat his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton.

Following Trump’s first electoral victory, then-President Barack Obama ordered a “comprehensive review” of claims that Russia had interfered in the election to benefit Trump. Then-Director of National Intelligence (DNI) James Clapper was in charge of conducting the review, but the new CIA report, circulated in late June and declassified for the public on Wednesday, found numerous “procedural concerns” and “procedural anomalies” in the crafting of the ICA, including political motivations and biases, reliance on unverified and biased information, a “rushed timeline,” and conclusions pre-determined by agency heads. The CIA concluded that these anomalies “led to departures from standard practices in the drafting, coordination, and reviewing of the ICA.” The report continued, “These departures impeded efforts to apply rigorous tradecraft, particularly to the assessment’s most contentious judgement.”

‘Rushed Timeline’

The CIA noted that ICAs typically “take months to prepare, especially for assessments of such length, complexity, and political sensitivity.” However, the Obama administration’s intelligence officials were given an “atypical” and “highly compressed timeline” to develop the “Russian collusion” ICA. Obama ordered the ICA on December 6, 2016, and it was due for CIA review by December 20. Many members of the intelligence community reported feeling “jammed” by the unusually short turnaround time for the ICA, and those responsible for the document’s final review saw the ICA for the first time during the final review, a day before it was to be circulated in the intelligence community.

“Compressing review of the draft by multiple stakeholders to just a handful of days during a holiday week also created numerous challenges,” the new CIA report noted. Those challenges “likely biased the overall review process to focus more on precision of language and sourcing rather than on more substantial, time-consuming edits to refine the overall presentation of the draft…”

Political Bias

Given that the election had already ended, the new CIA report noted that the ICA was “essentially a post-mortem analysis.” However, the unnecessarily and unusually 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.”

Another potential source of political bias came from agency head involvement which was “highly unusual in both scope and intensity.” Then-director of the CIA John Brennan decided to “take the lead drafting the report,” coordinating directly with the Obama White House and cutting out the National Intelligence Council, which is typically responsible for “drafting assignments, coordination, and review processes.” Clapper, Brennan, and then-director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) James Comey also pre-determined the ICA’s conclusions. Brennan informed those drafting the ICA that he had discussed “Russian collusion” with Clapper and Comey and that “there is strong consensus among us on the scope, nature, and intent of Russian interference in our recent presidential election.” The new CIA report noted, “Brennan’s premature signaling that agency heads had already reached consensus before the ICA was even coordinated risked stifling analytic debate” and steering the conclusions reached by agency employees.

Another significant concern was the inclusion of the controversial “Steele dossier” as a source. The Steele dossier, compiled by former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele, contained multiple unverified and unsubstantiated allegations from “anonymous sources” suggesting that Trump had strong financial ties to Russian government officials and oligarchs and was compromised by sexual blackmail material. The dossier was commissioned by a group called FusionGPS, which was funded by the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and the Clinton campaign. When the FBI later offered Steele $1 million to verify the dossier’s contents, he reported that he could not. The report’s funding, obvious political biases, and seemingly unverified nature made it suspect, even amongst members of the Obama-era intelligence community.

Nonetheless, Brennan insisted that the Steele dossier be included in the ICA — the same day that the report was set to be circulated for final review. Numerous CIA officials warned Brennan not to include the dossier, with the Deputy Director for Analysis arguing that including the controversial document would undermine “the credibility of the entire paper,” referring to the ICA. Others pointed out that the Steele dossier “did not meet even the most basic tradecraft standards.”

“Despite these objections, Brennan showed a preference for narrative consistency over analytical soundness,” the new CIA report stated. When expert CIA analysts and Russia-watchers pointed out glaring flaws with the dossier’s contents, Brennan was “more swayed by the Dossier’s general conformity with existing theories than by legitimate tradecraft concerns.” By ultimately including the Steele dossier, albeit as an attached annex, the new CIA report said that “the ICA implicitly elevated unsubstantiated claims to the status of credible supporting evidence, compromising the analytical integrity of the judgment.”

Minimal Sourcing

The Obama-era CIA and FBI concluded that Russian President Vladimir Putin had “aspired” to interfere in the U.S. presidential election in order to help Trump win, attaching a “high confidence” classification to this claim, indicating that they believed the assessment to be accurate. However, the ICA authors had only agreed that Putin had “aspired” to undermine trust in U.S. elections and harm Clinton’s campaign, not to install Trump as U.S. president. The National Security Agency (NSA) even disputed that Putin had “aspired” to benefit the Trump campaign and urged the CIA and FBI not to label the claim “high confidence,” citing “the limited source base, lack of corroborating intelligence, and ‘the possibility for an alternative judgment’…”

Ultimately, the ICA reviewers agreed and labeled the claim that Putin “aspired” to benefit the Trump campaign as “moderate confidence,” since the only credible source for the claim was a highly-classified, serialized CIA report.