CIA Contradicts Obama Officials’ Sworn Denials About Russiagate Report

The eight-page review conducted by career CIA analysts found the dossier did, in fact, worm its way into the text of the highly classified report known as an Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) to buttress the thinly sourced, yet inflammatory allegation that “Putin and the Russian Government aspired to help President-elect Trump’s election chances.”

“Ultimately, agency heads decided to include a two-page summary of the dossier as an annex to the ICA, with a disclaimer that the material was not used ‘to reach the analytic conclusions,’” the CIA review said on page five. “However, 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 [the dossier’s] unsubstantiated claims to the status of credible supporting evidence, compromising the analytical integrity of the judgment.”

The CIA’s “lessons-learned” report contradicts Obama administration officials’ claims – most of which were made under oath – that they did not use the since-debunked dossier. 

Former CIA Director John Brennan, for one, insisted in his sworn May 2017 testimony before Congress that the Steele dossier was not “in any way” used as a basis for the so-called ICA completed in late December 2016. Later, during a May 2023 House Judiciary Committee interview, Brennan claimed: “The CIA was very much opposed to having any reference or inclusion of the Steele dossier in the Intelligence Community Assessment.”

Likewise, then-National Intelligence Director James Clapper said in an official January 2017 statement that “we did not rely upon [the dossier] in any way for our conclusions.” Several months later, he assured Congress the dossier was “not a formal part of the Intelligence Community Assessment.”

More recently, Clapper also swore, "We didn't use [the dossier] in our Intelligence Community Assessment" and "We didn't use it for the Intelligence Community Assessment, we didn't draw on it." [Emphasis added.] In the same May 2023 House Judiciary interview, which was conducted in closed session but during which he was advised of federal perjury laws, he expounded that "the team that put together the Intelligence Community Assessment was not to draw on it as a source for the Intelligence Community Assessment. So you won't find a footnote using the dossier as a source."

While testifying in a December 2017 deposition, moreover, former deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe asserted that although a written summary of the dossier was appended to the classified version of the ICA, it was never referred to “in the main body” of the intel report.

“I participated in conversations [with Brennan and Clapper] in the consideration of how to handle the Steele reporting with respect to the ICA. And ultimately it ended up being included in ‘attachment A,’ rather than in the main body of the report,” he told the House Intelligence Committee, according to a transcript of the closed-door interview. “It’s handled and referred to in an appendix,” he added, “and not in the main body.”

McCabe’s boss, former FBI Director James B. Comey, swore the same thing during a September 2020 Senate Judiciary Committee hearing: “It was significant enough and consistent enough with other intelligence that it ought to be included, but it wasn’t sufficiently corroborated to be in the body of the Intelligence Community Assessment.”

The CIA review shows that the unverified and now-debunked dossier was used as support for the intelligence analysis, not just as a sidebar as Obama officials have maintained. And they relied on it to back the most inflammatory finding in the intelligence report. 

The new report also raises fresh questions about the candor of the Obama administration’s top intel operatives and whether they politicized intelligence to paint incoming GOP President Donald Trump as compromised by the Kremlin.

In an X post last week, deputy CIA Director Michael Ellis said newly declassified CIA emails “show how Brennan personally intervened to insert the Steele dossier’s lies into intelligence analysis” over the objections of his top Russia analysts at Langley.

According to a Dec. 29, 2016, email, Brennan ignored his deputy director for analysis, who warned him that including the dossier in any form risked “the credibility of the entire paper.” When two leaders of the CIA’s so-called Russia House also confronted him about incorporating the political propaganda, noting several flaws in the dossier, Brennan overruled them, insisting: “My bottom line is that I believe that the information warrants inclusion in the report.”

Inclusion of the dossier raised obvious red flags because its sourcing was suspect, and many of its claims seemed fanciful from the start. The Clinton campaign had tried and largely failed to convince news outlets to broadcast its wild allegations before the November election. It did not leap into the public sphere until Comey – after meeting with President Obama, Vice President Biden, and others in the Oval Office on Jan. 5, 2017 – briefed President-elect Trump on the document. This high-level meeting, which Clapper allegedly leaked to the media, was then used by CNN, BuzzFeed, and other news outlets to publicize its claims.

The newly surfaced documents are at odds with Brennan’s sworn 2023 statements before the House Judiciary Committee in which he claimed he was “very much opposed to having any reference or inclusion of the Steele dossier.”

The emails also conflict with his testimony that he was not involved with the dossier during the drafting of the assessment, even though he took the lead, according to the new CIA review.

“I was not involved in analyzing the dossier at all,” Brennan told the panel, according to a transcript of the closed-door interview. “The first time I actually saw it, it was after the election. And the CIA was not involved at all with the dossier.”

Asked during his earlier 2017 testimony if the CIA relied on the dossier, Brennan flatly replied, “No.”

“It wasn’t part of the corpus of intelligence, uh, information that we had,” he added, while fidgeting with his glasses. “It was not in any way used as a basis for the intelligence community assessment that was done, uh, it was not.”

Some U.S. intelligence veterans suspect Obama’s CIA director misled Congress because he knew the dossier wouldn’t withstand any serious scrutiny. “Brennan’s claims are impossible to believe,” said Fred Fleitz, who worked as a CIA analyst for almost 20 years and helped draft intelligence assessments at CIA headquarters.

Attempts to reach Brennan for comment were unsuccessful, and his attorney did not respond to queries. Attempts to reach McCabe, Comey, and Clapper through their lawyers were also unsuccessful.

But Brennan recently defended the ICA as a “very comprehensive, thoughtful analysis,” while suggesting that CIA chief John Ratcliffe, a Trump appointee who ordered the review, may have a political agenda of his own. He said he didn’t think Ratcliffe was an “independent, objective leader of the intelligence community.”

Fleitz asserted that it was Brennan who had the agenda. He said that “there is no question in my mind” that Brennan and other agency heads had reached a “predetermined political conclusion” about a Putin-Trump conspiracy and needed the dossier to help support their “weak” conclusion.

“The ICA is for the most part simply a reflection of the dossier’s central findings,” Fleitz said.

Indeed, the ICA’s attached summary states: “Some of the [dossier] reporting is consistent with the judgments in the assessment,” noting, for example, its claim that “Putin ordered the influence effort with the aim of defeating Clinton, whom Putin ‘feared and hated.’” The annexed summary also claimed Trump’s top advisers secretly met with Kremlin officials “to bolster his chances of beating Secretary Clinton,” including leaking her campaign emails.

The annex, which wasn’t declassified until 2020, did not disclose that the Clinton campaign paid for the dossier. Nor did it identify the author as FBI informant Christopher Steele, a former British government operative with a checkered record of reliability.

Subsequent investigations by Special Counsel Robert Mueller and Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz found his dossier allegations baseless. And it is now understood from the report issued by Special Counsel John Durham, which explored the roots of Russiagate, that Steele’s paid researcher, Igor Danchenko, had no real Kremlin sources; and simply invented the false rumors about Trump’s illicit ties to Russia. RealClearInvestigations previously reported that the FBI was aware of Danchenko’s key role in January 2017.

The CIA’s after-action report is the first peek into what was contained inside the “highest classified version” of the ICA – “Russia’s Influence Campaign Targeting the 2016 US Presidential Election,” dated Dec. 30, 2016. It differed from the unclassified January 2017 version that was released to the public. The public version did not contain the dossier material, blinding the American electorate to the political influence the Clinton campaign had in shaping the important U.S. intelligence product. (There was also a third version, classified at a lower level, which was used to brief top Republican and Democratic members of Congress. It’s not clear if that version also censored the dossier references.)

The ICA was a rush job prepared at the behest of President Obama following Trump’s upset victory over Clinton. On Dec. 6, 2016, the new CIA review reports, Obama ordered “then-Director of National Intelligence (DNI) James Clapper to conduct a comprehensive review of all available intelligence and provide the IC’s best assessment of Russian activities related to the election.” While such complex assessments, which draw on the findings of multiple intel agencies, usually take several months to prepare, Obama requested the finished product before he left office.  

It’s unclear whether Congress plans to refer some of the more recent false statements regarding the ICA and dossier to the Justice Department for criminal investigation. There is a five-year statute of limitations on lying to Congress. Asked if the House Judiciary Committee is investigating Clapper and Brennan for possible perjury during their 2023 testimony, spokesman Russell Dye told RCI: “Everything is on the table and we are actively looking into it.”

A declassified Senate Intelligence Committee report indicated there may have been a conspiracy to mislead Congress regarding the role the dossier played in supporting the ICA’s most critical conclusion about Putin. The 2020 report noted that every Obama administration witness who appeared before the panel to answer questions during its years-long Russiagate investigation testified the same way: “All individuals the committee interviewed stated that the Steele material did not in any way inform the analysis in the ICA – including key judgments.”

Obama administration officials also apparently misled the public.

In a March 2017 interview with NBC’s “Meet the Press” host Chuck Todd, Clapper asserted the dossier “was not included as a part of our report.” He also maintained, “We did not include any evidence [from the dossier] in our report that had any reflection of collusion between members of the Trump campaign and the Russians.”

Brennan also categorically denied using the dossier during a 2018 NBC “Meet the Press” interview: “It did not play any role whatsoever in the Intelligence Community Assessment that was done that was presented to then-President Obama.”

Brennan repeated the claim in his 2020 memoir: “The dossier did not inform any of the analysis or the judgments in the assessment itself.” In his own 2018 memoir, Clapper asserted, “We had not included it as part of our IC assessment.”

The CIA review makes it clear that a number of CIA and other analysts objected to Brennan including the dossier, arguing it was political rumor and not sound intelligence. Some CIA analytic managers even jumped off the project because of concerns over the dossier’s veracity.

Reviewing their past testimony,  RCI found that Comey, McCabe, Brennan, and Clapper all either didn’t recall or outright denied knowing that the Clinton campaign was behind the dossier at the time they were involved in drafting the ICA.

But their ignorance strains credulity, because they all knew of a Clinton campaign “plan” to vilify Trump by tying him to Putin. In July 2016, Brennan briefed Obama on CIA intelligence which had found that Clinton was planning to tie Trump to Russia in order to deflect attention from her illegal use of a private server while serving as secretary of state. In addition,  the Democratic political origins of the dossier were known to FBI leadership as early as October 2016 – more than two months before the ICA was crafted.

Much of the Washington media also knew the problematic provenance of the dossier as early as September 2016, yet never disclosed that critical fact when they reported stories about Trump possibly colluding with the Kremlin during the election. Even after the media published the dossier in full in January 2017, they sat on the highly relevant news of the Clinton campaign’s role in it for another 10 months.