2016 Report on Russian Election Interference Was ‘Deliberately Corrupted’ by Top-Ranking Obama Officials

2016 Report on Russian Election Interference Was ‘Deliberately Corrupted’ by Top-Ranking Obama Officials

In May, CIA Director John Ratcliffe commissioned members of the agency’s Directorate of Analysis to conduct a “lessons-learned” review of the 2016 Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) on Russian interference in the presidential election. The review focused on the ICA’s most controversial judgment: that Russia had interfered in the U.S. presidential election to benefit then-candidate Donald Trump. This was precisely the impression the ICA’s authors intended to convey.

The New York Post’s Miranda Devine, the first journalist to obtain the review, summed up its findings as follows:

The review found that the ICA was deliberately corrupted by then-CIA Director John Brennan, FBI Director James Comey and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, who were “excessively involved” in its drafting, and rushed its completion in a “chaotic,” “atypical” and “markedly unconventional” process that raised questions of a “potential political motive.”

…

Brennan’s decision to include the discredited Steele dossier, over the objections of the CIA’s most senior Russia experts, “undermined the credibility” of the assessment.

Brennan’s determination to include the Steele dossier in the ICA was especially significant given that he knew in July 2016 that it was nothing more than a collection of bogus stories commissioned by the DNC and the Hillary Clinton campaign and conjured up by former British spy Christopher Steele and his sub-sources. And so did then-President Barack Obama.

We know that because in October 2020, Fox News reported that Brennan briefed Obama and others present during a July 28, 2016, Oval Office meeting on “Hillary Clinton’s purported ‘plan’ to tie then-candidate Donald Trump to Russia as ‘a means of distracting the public from her use of a private email server’ ahead of the 2016 presidential election.”

According to the review, “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 December 29 that including it in any form risked ‘the credibility of the entire paper.’”

Still Brennan insisted on including it. His response? “My bottom line is that I believe that the information warrants inclusion in the report.”

The FBI also fought for the dossier’s inclusion. The review stated: “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.”

In the end, a compromise was reached. A two-page summary of the dossier was added as an “annex” to the ICA with a disclaimer that it was not used “to reach the analytic conclusions.”

According to the review, “by placing a reference to the annex material in the main body of the ICA as the fourth supporting bullet for the judgment that Putin ‘aspired’ to help Trump win, the ICA implicitly elevated unsubstantiated claims to the status of credible supporting evidence, compromising the analytical integrity of the judgment.”

Obama ordered the ICA on December 6, 2016. The review found “multiple procedural irregularities” that called the ICA’s credibility into question, such as “a highly compressed production timeline, stringent compartmentation, and excessive involvement of agency heads.”

For example, Brennan was in charge of the project. The review states that Brennan’s, Comey’s, and Clapper’s “direct engagement in the ICA’s development was highly unusual in both scope and intensity” and ”risked stifling analytic debate.”

“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.”

In fact, the review discovered: “One CIA analytic manager involved in the process said other analytic managers — who would typically have been part of the review chain — opted out due to the politically charged environment and the atypical prominence of agency leadership in the process.” [Emphasis added.]

The review noted that the ICA included input from just four of the then-17 intelligence agencies: ODNI, CIA, FBI, and NSA.

In particular, the review took issue with the ICA’s decision to “marginalize the National Intelligence Council (NIC), departing significantly from standard procedures for formal IC assessments. The NIC did not receive or even see the final draft until just hours before the ICA was due to be published … Typically, the NIC maintains control over drafting assignments, coordination, and review processes.”

It also looked at the role media leaks to The Washington Post and The New York Times may have had in influencing the authors of the ICA. It states that on December 9, 2016, both media outlets published reports saying that “the IC had concluded with high confidence that Russia had intervened specifically to help Trump win the election. The Post cited an unnamed U.S. official describing this as the IC’s ‘consensus view.'”

In an interview with Devine, Ratcliffe said, “This was Obama, Comey, Clapper, and Brennan deciding ‘We’re going to screw Trump.'”

He continued:

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.

You see how Brennan and Clapper and Comey manipulated [and] silenced all the career professionals and railroaded the process.

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. https://t.co/S7Mxz6xA6P

— CIA Director John Ratcliffe (@CIADirector) July 2, 2025

Few will be surprised by this review. After all, so much has already been revealed about this scandal. Yet despite the overwhelming evidence, none of these former officials have ever been held accountable. That’s unfortunate because it has emboldened Democrats to take their vendetta against Trump to ever greater heights, including attempts to bankrupt him and imprison him through relentless lawfare after he announced his candidacy for 2024. Put simply, we’ve seen Democrats orchestrate one political fraud after another to destroy Trump and to regain power.

But they grew sloppy. They took things too far and their plans seem to have hit a speed bump. Democrats no longer even pretend to care about improving the lives of their constituents. And as reflected in the party’s dismal approval ratings, a significant portion of the electorate may have finally recognized the truth. A decade of corruption will do that.

Elizabeth writes commentary for Legal Insurrection and The Washington Examiner. She is an academy fellow at The Heritage Foundation. Please follow Elizabeth on X or LinkedIn.

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