You may have read about the report that the Deputy Director of the CIA for Analysis recently submitted to CIA Director John Ratcliffe on the CIA’s anti-Trump effort at the end of 2016. The report is dated June 26, 2025, and is embedded below. I am not sure who wrote it. Google’s AI says that the Deputy Director for Analysis position is currently open.
Maybe Michael Ellis, the Agency’s Deputy Director, was responsible. Ellis is a friend of Paul Mirengoff, and we wrote about him here and elsewhere as he rose in the intelligence world. It is safe to say that Ellis is extremely well qualified and solidly conservative.
This is how the report begins:
In May 2025, Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (DCIA) John Ratcliffe tasked CIA’s Directorate of Analysis (DA) to conduct a lessons-learned review of the procedures and analytic tradecraft employed in the highest classified version of the Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) Russia’s Influence Campaign Targeting the 2016 US Presidential Election, dated 30 December 2016. The review focused particular attention on the ICA’s most debated judgment—that Russian President Vladimir Putin “aspired” to help then-candidate Donald Trump win the election. Drawing on CIA materials provided to congressional oversight investigations, the DA examined whether any procedural anomalies or tradecraft weaknesses may have affected the soundness and objectivity of this key judgment and the overall assessment.
Some have criticized this June 2025 report as not being sufficiently harsh in its critique of what John Brennan, the CIA Director in 2016, James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence at that time; and FBI Director James Comey did. But it is plenty harsh. Here are some excerpts. Emphases in the quotes below are mine:
[B]efore work on the assessment even began, media leaks suggesting that the IC [Intelligence Community] had already reached definitive conclusions risked creating an anchoring bias.
On 9 December, both the Washington Post and New York Times reported the IC had concluded with high confidence that Russia had intervened specifically to help Trump win the election. The Post cited an unnamed US official describing this as the IC’s “consensus view.”
The whole Russia collusion hoax was a put-up job that started with the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign. CIA and FBI officials used the New York Times, The Washington Post, and other “news” outlets to smear Donald Trump with false leaks that perpetrated the hoax.
The December 2016 Russia report was rushed to completion on an extraordinarily short timeline:
The election had concluded, and the ICA was essentially a post-mortem analysis. Therefore, 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.
No kidding.
Central to the judgment that Putin “aspired” to help Trump win was one highly classified CIA report. Brennan had tightly restricted access to this information within CIA; it had been collected in July but not disseminated in CIA serialized reporting until the week of 19 December.
That was to minimize discussion of whether that single report, so dear to Brennan, was a fraud, or was simply wrong.
One business day before IC analysts convened for the only coordination session on the ICA, Brennan sent a note to the CIA workforce stating he had met with the DNI and FBI Director and that “there is strong consensus among us on the scope, nature, and intent of Russian interference in our recent Presidential election.” While officers involved in drafting the ICA consistently said they did not feel pressured to reach specific conclusions, Brennan’s premature signaling that agency heads had already reached consensus before the ICA was even coordinated risked stifling analytic debate.
So the Russia report’s conclusions were essentially dictated in advance by the rabidly anti-Trump former Communist John Brennan.
The IC’s Russia report included the Steele “dossier,” which we now know was a complete fraud commissioned by the Clinton presidential campaign. It was a crude fake that fell apart as soon as the FBI tried to verify it. But as of late 2016, FBI Director James Comey was committed to the fake dossier as a means of bringing down the Trump administration.
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 20 December—the same day the largely coordinated draft was entering the review process at CIA. 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.
So James Comey is a particular villain here, along with John Brennan. The intelligence officers involved in the process objected to including the Steele dossier:
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. CIA’s Deputy Director for Analysis (DDA) warned in an email to Brennan on 29 December that including it in any form risked “the credibility of the entire paper.”
That is a quote worth writing down. As of December 2016, as the Democrats’ coordinated effort to bring down the Trump administration was just being launched, the CIA officials responsible for Russia said 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. 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. Brennan ultimately formalized his position in writing, stating that “my bottom line is that I believe that the information warrants inclusion in the report.”
Of course he did. Because Brennan was a far-left political activist, not a legitimate intelligence professional.
The current report concludes that Brennan’s deviations from normal practice were critical:
The procedural anomalies that characterized the ICA’s development had a direct impact on the tradecraft applied to its most contentious finding.
That is, that Russia was trying to help Trump win, as opposed to generally sowing confusion.
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.
***
The two senior leaders of the CIA mission center responsible for Russia argued jointly against including the “aspire” judgment. In an email to Brennan on 30 December, they stated the judgment should be removed because it was both weakly supported and unnecessary, given the strength and logic of the paper’s other findings on intent. They warned that including it would only “open up a line of very politicized inquiry.”
But the claim that Putin was trying to help Trump win was the only element of this whole story that John Brennan, James Comey and their fellow Democratic Party activists were interested in. So it went into the supposed “consensus” intelligence community report.
As I said before, some have criticized this report as not being sufficiently damning of John Brennan, James Comey and the other Democratic Party activists who concocted the Russia smear. That may be a fair comment, but by any normal standard, the report is damning enough.
Here is is. You can judge for yourself:
Tradecraft Review 2016 ICA on Election Interference 062625 by John Hinderaker on Scribd
