The Obama administration violated intelligence analysis protocols and relied on fabricated reports and politically-compromised sources to further the “Russian collusion” hoax following the 2016 election, according to newly-declassified documents.

Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Tulsi Gabbard declassified and published a 2020 House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence report on Wednesday, examining the January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) that became the basis for claims of “Russian collusion” related to President Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 presidential election. That report found that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), then under the command of Director John Brennan, relied on “substandard” and falsified information to support the “Russian collusion” narrative and that there was no evidence to support the claim that Russian President Vladimir Putin “preferred” a Trump win against Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton. In fact, Putin collected and withheld damaging information on Clinton in anticipation of her victory.

The 2017 ICA relied on information from 15 CIA reports. According to the House Intelligence review, 12 of those reports “employed proper analytic tradecraft and were consistent with observed Russian behavior.” Those reports suggested that Russia’s election interference went no further than “conventional and cyber influence operations,” including hacking into campaign servers and publishing potentially damaging information. However, those reports also agreed that “Putin’s principal motivations in these operations were to undermine faith in the US democratic process and to weaken what the Russians considered to be an inevitable Clinton presidency…”

The other three CIA reports used, however, were “substandard — containing information that was unclear, of uncertain origin, potentially biased, or implausible…” Those three reports “became foundational sources for the ICA judgments that Putin preferred Trump over Clinton.” A tradecraft report published earlier this month by the CIA, now under the command of Director John Ratcliffe, reached similar conclusions, finding numerous “procedural concerns” and “procedural anomalies,” in addition to political motivations and biases and a reliance on unverified and biased information. Ratcliffe’s CIA asserted that these anomalies “led to departures from standard practices in the drafting, coordination, and reviewing of the ICA” and that “[t]hese departures impeded efforts to apply rigorous tradecraft, particularly to the assessment’s most contentious judgement,” that of Putin’s motivation in supposedly interfering in the 2016 election.

The House Intelligence Committee agreed in 2020 that the ICA featured “significant tradecraft failures,” particularly relating to the assertion that Putin preferred a Trump victory over a Clinton victory. “The ICA failed to acknowledge that key judgments on Putin’s intentions were based on raw intelligence that did not meet tradecraft standards,” the House report observed.

In fact, the ICA cited only one piece of classified CIA information to support the claim that Putin “aspired” to assist the Trump campaign — and that information was “one scant, unclear, and unverifiable fragment of a sentence” from a single human intelligence source. That quote reads:

“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.” (Emphasis original)

“The significance of this fragment to the ICA case that Putin ‘aspired’ for candidate Trump to win cannot be overstated,” the House Intelligence Committee observed. It continued, “The major ‘high confidence’ judgment of the ICA on one opinion about a text fragment with uncertain meaning, that may be garble, and for which it is not clear how it was obtained.” The source quoted in the ICA had a “strong dislike for Putin and his regime” and “an anti-Trump bias,” according to CIA officers, but Brennan and his collaborators on the ICA did not acknowledge or address this clear political motivation in the ICA. The House Intelligence Committee noted that none of Russia’s efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election support the ICA assessment “because these activities were all consistent with Putin’s objectives to undermine faith in US democracy, without regard for candidate Trump’s fate.”

Top CIA analysts and experts recommended that the ambiguous and potentially politically-motivated fragment not be included in the ICA, but Brennan “overruled” them to ensure that it was included. Brennan also ignored the warnings of analysts and senior CIA officials not to include the controversial Steele dossier in the ICA. That dossier, compiled by former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele and funded by the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee (DNC), included unverified and anonymous sources making vulgar claims that Trump was compromised by Russian oligarchs and politicians and could easily be blackmailed as president.

“CIA analysts and operations officers struggled to explain how the ICA … could have included dossier information without identifying and vetting primary sources and without explaining the political circumstances surrounding why the report was produced and funded,” the House Intelligence Committee wrote. The committee emphasized that the “ICA sourcing errors involving the dossier violated so many” intelligence community (IC) protocols and directives “that the text would normally not have passed first-line supervisor review at CIA, FBI or other IC agencies.” It added, “Moreover, the dossier made outlandish claims and was written in an amateurish conspiracy and political propaganda tone that invited skepticism, if not ridicule, over its content.”

Multiple senior CIA analysts and officials urged Brennan not to include the Steele dossier, which eventually made its way into the ICA as an annex. Every single CIA analyst and operations officer questioned by House investigators stressed that he had nothing to do with the Steele dossier’s inclusion and even questioned the veracity of the dossier’s contents. The decision to include it was once again made by Brennan, who dismissed the Steele dossier’s failure to “meet basic tradecraft standards” and its clear links to political motivations and biases. When one senior CIA official pointed out the dossier’s “many flaws,” Brennan responded, “Yes, but doesn’t it ring true?” According to Ratcliffe’s CIA, Brennan made the decision to include the Steele dossier last-minute, adding it as an annex the same day that the report was scheduled for final review.

The ICA also excluded and contradicted countless prior intelligence reports relating to Russia. For example, until December of 2016, a month after the election, CIA intelligence had agreed with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), National Security Agency (NSA), Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and other U.S. intelligence agencies and entities that Russia had neither the means nor the motivation to actually influence the results of the election and would likely be limited to online propaganda campaigns and campaign server hacking. Such intelligence was suppressed from the ICA, as was “reliable evidence that Putin’s key advisers saw significant downsides to a Trump presidency.”

The authors of the ICA also suppressed the fact that Russia had gathered damning information on Clinton and refused to publish it in the final weeks before the election to bolster a Trump win, instead holding on to the information in anticipation of a Clinton victory. Namely, the Russians had found “information that President Obama and [Democratic] Party leaders found the state of Secretary Clinton’s health to be ‘extraordinarily alarming,’ and felt it could have ‘serious negative impact’ on her election prospects.” The Russians also reportedly obtained DNC emails and communications suggesting that Clinton was “suffering from ‘intensified psycho-emotional problems, including uncontrolled fits of anger, aggression, and cheerfulness’” and “was placed on a daily regimen of ‘heavy tranquilizers…’”

The House Intelligence Committee observed that “when the race evolved to the point where it was possible for Putin to help Trump win — the polls narrowed dramatically as Election Day approached — the ICA did not address why Putin chose not to leak more discrediting material on Clinton in order to ‘help Trump’s chances of victory.’” The committee added, “Putin’s decision not to leak additional derogatory information on Secretary Clinton as the polls narrowed undermines the ICA’s claim that he ‘aspired’ to help Trump win…”

Both the House Intelligence Committee report and a cache of documents declassified by Gabbard last week explicate that the ICA was created at the express command of then-President Barack Obama, who hosted a meeting with Brennan, then-DNI James Clapper, then-FBI Director James Comey, then-Secretary of State John Kerry, then-National Security Advisor Susan Rice, and others, just one day after Brennan, Clapper, and Comey buried an IC report confirming that Russian interference did not affect the outcome of the 2016 election.

In light of these reports, Gabbard announced on Wednesday that she is referring Obama to the Department of Justice (DOJ) for criminal investigation and possible prosecution. “We have referred and will continue to refer all of these documents to the [DOJ] and the FBI to investigate the criminal implications of this,” the DNI announced in a press conference. She continued, “The evidence that we found and that we have released directly point to President Obama leading the manufacturing of this intelligence assessment. There are multiple pieces of evidence and intelligence that confirm that fact.”

In comments to The Washington Stand, FRC Action Director Matt Carpenter remarked, “It is hard to think of anything more damaging to a presidency than cooked up intelligence reports smearing the incoming administration with false allegations of working with a foreign nation to rig elections, as it appears the out-going Obama administration did to President Trump in his first term. This scam caused more damage to Trump’s ability to execute the duties of his office in his first term, harmed America’s foreign policy in ways we will probably never fully understand, and undermined the sanctity of our elections, all in one fell swoop.”

“Good for DNI Gabbard for referring the former president and many in his administration to the Department of Justice for possible prosecution,” Carpenter continued. “While it’s impossible to wind the clock back and give Trump another go at his first term, the DOJ can and should bring justice to bear to the central figures involved in this wicked scheme. Hopefully, this will send a message to anyone who would abuse their role in the federal government from going after someone for political reasons and help restore trust in the intelligence community and our elections.”