OPINION:
In 2016, President Barack Obama’s intelligence team relied more on the Democratic-financed Steele dossier than originally thought, as it rushed out a paper on Russian election meddling to damage Donald Trump before he took the presidency.
And then-CIA Director John Brennan — an Obama chum now under federal investigation — was in the thick of it.
We know this now thanks to CIA Director John Ratcliffe, a President Trump supporter. He wanted to fact-check Mr. Obama’s intelligence loyalists when they published an Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) on Dec. 30, 2016. The ICA accused Russia of election interference and said Vladimir Putin tried to help Mr. Trump and hurt the chances of Hillary Clinton.
This conclusion has rankled the Trump side, given that Moscow intelligence fed bogus anti-Trump rumors that found their way to dossier creator Christopher Steele and were spread by Democrats.
Rep. Devin Nunes, now a top Trump intelligence adviser, smelled a rat that December because Mr. Brennan refused to brief Congress on the in-production ICA.
“The Committee is deeply concerned that intransigence in sharing intelligence with Congress can enable the manipulation of intelligence for political purposes,” he said in a statement on Dec. 14, 2016.
The ICA founders made up a familiar group of anti-Trump activists: CIA’s Brennan, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and, of course, FBI Director James Comey. He trafficked the dossier to judges, Congress, Brennan and Clapper after Hillary Clinton operatives fed it to FBI headquarters.
Last month, Mr. Ratcliffe released his “Tradecraft Review of the 2016 Intelligence Community Assessment on Russian Election Interference.” Its eight pages focus on the frenzy to get the thing published. But what I found most interesting were the paragraphs about Mr. Brennan and the dossier.
Let me set the scene. The liberal establishment in post-election 2016 Washington was rabidly accusing Mr. Trump of election collusion with Mr. Putin. Russia had hacked Democratic Party computers. Bits of bogus dossier slime about a Putin-Trump “collusion” were oozing their way into the left-wing news media.
I have written that the dossier stands as the biggest hoax in American political history given these facts: Clinton activists and surrogates like Mr. Comey spread felony allegations to Washington’s power bastions — the FBI, the Justice Department, Congress, the State Department and the CIA — and the target was presidential candidate Trump, president-elect Trump and President Trump. Finally, all substantive dossier claims were bogus. They tried to ruin a presidency with a hoax.
The chief dossier source, Russian Igor Danchenko, eventually told the FBI in January and March 2017 interviews that he merely relayed to Mr. Steele gossip he had picked up in Moscow over drinks. None of it — zero — was confirmed, he said. The FBI subsequently paid him nearly $300,000 to try to confirm claims and he could not.
That brings us to December 2016, as the Clapper-Brennan-Comey trifecta began following Mr. Obama’s order to write a Russian assessment. Mr. Comey showed up with the dossier, which would not become fully public until Jan. 10, 2017, days before Mr. Trump took office.
I assume the reason Mr. Comey did not tell the CIA that the dossier was Democratic Party smut was because ICA producers did not know. Likewise, when Mr. Comey visited President-elect Trump at Trump towers on Jan. 6 to rattle him with dossier hearsay, he didn’t tell him it was a partisan Democratic Party product.
The Senate Intelligence Committee investigated the ICA-dossier link for a 2020 report. It interviewed Mr. Brennan, who portrayed himself as a dossier skeptic.
The Senate report reads, “Director Brennan reiterated the CIA’s reservations about the FBI’s Steele material, noting that [one directorate] ‘was very concerned about polluting the ICA with this material,’ and that ‘there was stiff opposition, especially from CIA, to include that material either in essence or in substance in that report’ which was not used in any way as far as the judgments in the ICA were concerned.’”
Regarding Mr. Comey, the Senate report reads, “On December 28, Director Comey was still insisting the document be in the body. On December 29, [CIA] Deputy Director [David] Cohen and [FBI] Deputy Director [Andrew] McCabe agreed to place the material in an annex.”
The report quotes Mr. Brennan: “Initially FBI wanted it incorporated into the assessment itself. We all pushed back on that.”
Got that? Mr. Brennan did not want to pollute the ICA with the dossier and he “pushed back.”
A dossier summary ended up in the ICA’s classified “Annex A,” we were told, but not in the report proper.
Nearly nine years later, CIA Director Ratcliffe’s report tells a different story. Mr. Brennan overruled objections from seasoned analysts who wanted the report to delete the assertion that Mr. Putin “aspired” to hurt Mrs. Clinton and help Mr. Trump.
Produced by the directorate of analysis, the Ratcliffe report says Mr. Brennan not only rejected this argument, but also endorsed the dossier.
“Despite these objections,” the report reads, “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 bottomline is that I believe that the information warrants inclusion in the report.’”
Instead of relegating the dossier to the Annex A prison, its unsubstantiated claims made it into the report’s main body as a “supporting bullet for the judgement that Putin ‘aspired’ to help Trump win,” according to the Ratcliffe report.
By doing this, the Tradecraft report says, “the CIA implicitly elevated unsubstantiated claims to the status of credible supporting evidence, compromising the analytical integrity of the judgment.”
On X, Mr. Ratcliffe posted two stinging rebukes. “All the world can now see the truth: Brennan, Clapper and Comey manipulated intelligence and silenced career professionals — all to get Trump” and “@POTUS has trusted me with helping to end weaponization of US intelligence. Today’s report underscores that the 2016 IC Assessment was conducted through an atypical & corrupt process under the politically charged environment of former Dir. Brennan & former FBI Dir. Comey.”
The Senate report contained another FBI whopper. The FBI told a CIA analyst that the bureau was able “to corroborate some of the sub-sourcing” in the dossier.
In fact, when Mr. Comey was championing the dossier and Mr. Brennan was backing him, not one allegation against Mr. Trump had been confirmed, nor would it ever be.
Fox News Digital reported on Tuesday that the Justice Department is investigating both Mr. Brennan and Mr. Comey for their actions in the Trump-Russia saga.
• Rowan Scarborough is a columnist with The Washington Times.
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