Obama White House / Flickr
By Jordan Boyd. Media: Thefederalist
The intelligence community assessment weaponized by Democrats, corporate media, and the deep state to carry the Russia collusion hoax into President Donald Trump’s first term was fueled by former Central Intelligence Agency Director John Brennan. Now a new Central Intelligence Agency review concludes that Brennan overrode internal concerns to claim that Russia interfered in the 2016 election.
The June 2025 review, commissioned by Central Intelligence Agency Director John Ratcliffe in May, scrutinized the “highest classified version” of a December 2016 assessment titled “Russia’s Influence Campaign Targeting the 2016 US Presidential Election.”
It finds that the analysis touted by Brennan as evidence that Russian President Vladimir Putin hoped to help his preferred political candidate Trump win the 2016 election was rushed, restricted in its access, and then far too widely disseminated for a highly classified report. Further, the report’s developers “marginalize[d]” the National Intelligence Council (NIC) and others to advance a partisan get Trump narrative. In fact, according to the review, the ICA had “a higher confidence level than was justified.”
“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.”
Similarly, the review notes that “media leaks” indicated intelligence agencies “had already reached definitive conclusions risked creating an anchoring bias” before “work on the assessment even began.”
The ICA, alleging the Kremlin meddled in U.S. affairs to ensure Trump’s election, was shared in a briefing to President Barack Obama and Trump in January 2017.
“The ‘aspired’ judgment did not merit the ‘high confidence’ level that CIA and FBI attached to it,” the review states.
Yet a 2017 report indicated more than 200 U.S. officials were privy to the highest classified version of the report, the review notes, calling this number “unusually high.”
The Federalist raised concerns in 2017 that President Barack Obama’s White House politicized intelligence to influence the 2016 election. The 2025 review confirms that the “accelerated” push to share the ICA’s conclusions “created vulnerabilities and opened lines of inquiry about potential bias.”
More specifically, the review finds that while the NIC often “maintains control over” the draft, coordination, and review associated with ICA’s like the 2016 one, the organization was sidelined. Brennan even bragged in his 2020 book that he wrenched draft control away from the NIC and limited coordination to the “ODNI, CIA, FBI, and NSA” offices.
“These departures from standard procedure not only limited opportunities for coordination and thorough tradecraft review, but also resulted in the complete exclusion of key intelligence agencies from the process,” the review warns, noting that the Defense Intelligence Agency and the Department of State’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research were “entirely shut out.”
The review also shows that Brennan was warned by the CIA’s Deputy Director for Analysis that including the infamously debunked Steele dossier in the assessment would risk “the credibility of the entire paper.” Instead, Brennan’s confidence in the dossier and insistence that it make the cut continued, despite objections from at least two mission center leaders who pointed out the dossier’s “specific flaws.”
“He appeared more swayed by the Dossier’s general conformity with existing theories than by legitimate tradecraft concerns,” the review notes.
Brennan later lied to Congress about the dossier’s presence in the assessment, something Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz confirmed in a 2019 report.
“All the world can now see the truth: Brennan, Clapper and Comey manipulated intelligence and silenced career professionals — all to get Trump. Thank you to the career [CIA] officers who conducted this review and exposed the facts,” Ratcliffe wrote in a statement posted to X.
In his official statement circulated by the CIA, Ratcliffe confirmed that “agency heads at the time created a politically charged environment that triggered an atypical analytic process around an issue essential to our democracy.”
In its review conclusion titled “Lessons Learned,” the CIA determined that the ICA, even though it was “deemed defensible,” reeked of “procedural anomalies and tradecraft issues.”
“Adhering to established analytic processes and rigorous tradecraft is essential to ensure credibility, objectivity, and accuracy — particularly when time pressures, sensitive information, and high-level attention create risks of compromising standard practices,” the review states.
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