The intelligence community is taking another blow to its credibility, former CIA analysts say, with newly released declassified material alleging that top Obama administration officials deliberately misled the public into believing President Trump colluded with Russia to win the 2016 election.
The newly released tranches of information, declassified by National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard and turned over as evidence to the Justice Department for criminal referrals, show how much the intelligence community became politicized and weaponized against its opponents, starting with President Obama and later President Biden, analysts say.
Ms. Gabbard said top Obama administration officials manufactured a bogus intelligence report about Russian interference a month after the 2016 election and that officials must be held accountable for using it to try to undermine the Trump administration.
These former Obama officials, Ms. Gabbard has said, include Mr. Obama himself, former National Intelligence Director James R. Clapper, former CIA Director John O. Brennan and former FBI Director James B. Comey.
Mr. Clapper said after the release of the evidence that he has “lawyered up.”
Fred Fleitz, a former CIA analyst who spent nearly two decades with the spy agency, said he thinks “the whole thing really undermined the reputation of U.S. intelligence, not just CIA.”
“It made it look like it’s a big political game. There’s always some politics, but it was never as bad as it was until Trump became president,” he said, citing alleged partisan misuse of intelligence by then-Rep. Adam B. Schiff, California Democrat, and Mr. Brennan. “There always [were] some guardrails that people wouldn’t cross, but they were all broken when Trump became president, and I still don’t think it’s recovered.”
Ms. Gabbard said that since she released the newly declassified material, intelligence community whistleblowers have provided more information.
“We have whistleblowers … coming forward now, after we released these documents because there are people who were around, who were working within the intelligence community who are so disgusted by what happened,” Ms. Gabbard said recently on Fox News. “We’re starting to see some of them come out of the woodwork here because they, too, like you and I and the American people, want to see justice delivered.”
Mr. Fleitz told The Washington Times that his friends in the intelligence community “really despise Mr. Brennan.”
“I think he was a political hack who did a lot of damage to the agency, not just with this intelligence community assessment and with his promotion of the Steele dossier, [named after British MI6 officer Christopher Steele], but with years of political commentary on MSNBC attacking Trump,” he said. “As a former CIA officer, that’s just not done. It’s not dignified, and it really angered Trump, and it made Trump distrust American intelligence even more.”
The Times has reached out for comment from Mr. Brennan.
CIA Director John Ratcliffe said more explosive documents would soon be declassified and made public.
“What that intelligence shows is that part of this was a Hillary Clinton plan, but part of it was an FBI plan to be an accelerant to that fake Steele dossier, to those fake Russian collusion claims, by pouring oil on the fire, by amplifying the lie and burying the truth of what Hillary Clinton was up to,” he said on told Fox News’ “Sunday Morning Futures.”
The FBI has launched criminal investigations into suspected wrongdoing by Mr. Brennan and Mr. Comey related to the Trump-Russia investigation, including alleged perjury to Congress.
Earlier this month, Mr. Ratcliffe sent evidence of wrongdoing by Mr. Brennan to FBI Director Kash Patel to investigate for potential prosecution.
The referral described Mr. Brennan’s and Mr. Comey’s interactions as a “conspiracy,” which could open various prosecutorial options.
The Brennan investigation began after a CIA report condemned the way intelligence agencies, including the CIA under Mr. Brennan, concluded that Russia had interfered with the 2016 presidential election in Mr. Trump’s favor.
Ultimately, the report struck at the inclusion of the Steele dossier in the summary. The 2017 now-debunked dossier made salacious allegations of misconduct and cooperation between the Trump campaign and Russia.
The Ratcliffe report called the dossier “unsubstantiated” and said using it “implicitly elevated unsubstantiated claims to the status of credible supporting evidence, compromising the analytical integrity of the judgment.”
Mr. Ratcliffe said the reason for the anomalies is that “agency heads at the time created a politically charged environment that triggered an atypical analytic process around an issue essential to our democracy.”
The latest DNI declassified report, prepared by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence in 2020, was based on an investigation launched by Chairman Devin Nunes, California Republican, and dated Sept. 18, 2020. Mr. Nunes is a close ally of Mr. Trump.
However, the public never saw the report because Democrats had taken control of the lower chamber of Congress when Republican staffers completed it and Mr. Schiff had become the committee chair. Instead, it stayed classified within the intelligence community.
Now declassified, the committee’s report showed in the intelligence community assessment of 2017 that Mr. Brennan pressured officials to include the Steele dossier despite knowing it was based on an “internet rumor.”
The report said the intelligence community assessment was a “high-profile product ordered by [Mr. Obama], directed by senior IC agency heads, and created by just five CIA analysts, using one principal drafter.”
“Production of the ICA was subject to unusual directives from the President and senior political appointees, and particularly DCIA,” the report says. “The draft was not properly coordinated within CIA or the IC, ensuring it would be published without significant challenges to its conclusions.”
Mr. Brennan was key to having the right intelligence community people in place to reach these conclusions. He served as a national security adviser to Mr. Obama during the 2008 presidential campaign. Mr. Obama brought him into the administration as an aide within the National Security Council. By the time Mr. Obama entered his second term, he tapped Mr. Brennan to be CIA director.
Former CIA officer John Kiriakou told The Times that Mr. Brennan was “politicizing intelligence” if he overrode CIA analysts who denied any Russian interference in the 2016 election and insisted on the conclusion that Russia had interfered.
“We were always taught that that was absolutely forbidden. We could never, ever do that. And then to … add insult to injury, the Steele dossier, the analysts said that they gave it no credibility at all,” he said. “And then [Mr. Brennan] demanded that they include it in the report. [The analysts] stood up to him and didn’t, and then he ended up ordering that it be attached as an appendix, again, politicizing the intelligence.”
Mr. Kiriakou said Mr. Brennan rose to CIA director after a wave of agency retirements in 2006 and 2007.
“Half the people who retired went to the McCain campaign, half of the people went to the Hillary campaign. And for whatever reason, John [Brennan] was the only person that went to the Obama campaign,” Mr. Kiriakou said. “And so he became the guy on intelligence. And the rest is history.”
Mr. Fleitz said Mr. Brennan worked to prove his credentials with the Obama campaign and with Mr. Obama.
“It paid off for Obama because when this intelligence committee assessment was commissioned by Obama,” he said, “there were five drafters all hand-chosen by Brennan, and the top guy was a partisan Obama staffer in the NSC, also chosen by Obama.”
He added, “This is not the way these things are done. Usually, there are many people who hold the pen. There’s a careful process to make sure things are vetted that, obviously, wasn’t done with the ICA.”
Correction: A previous version of this article misattributed an interview quote of Mr. Clapper’s.
• Kerry Picket can be reached at kpicket@washingtontimes.com.
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