The 2017 ICA: Cooking with Water

In my native language, German, we have a saying: “Die anderen kochen auch nur mit Wasser.” Roughly translated, it means: “Those other people are also just using water to cook.” It expresses the surprise one might feel when it is discovered that a supposedly very advanced and sophisticated adversary handles their daily business like everyone else, and makes stupid mistakes, like everyone else does. This saying embodies how I feel about the HPSCI report on the 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment on Trump’s ties to Russia, that Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard recently declassified.

I understand that this story is quite complicated and hard to follow, especially if you spent most of the last decade believing everything the press has said about Donald Trump being an agent for the Russians. But please bear with me. I feel this whole topic is of utmost importance, because I think it is vital for people to understand how they have been let down and were emotionally manipulated by journalists who were — knowingly or unknowingly — doing the bidding of powerful people, who did not have the public’s best interest at heart. If this kind of thing persists, if journalists continue to report things because they want them to be true rather than because they are true, Western democracies are doomed. And not because of the Russians, but because of ourselves, our own politicians and our intelligence services. Because we let those intelligence officials, other parts of the government and the journalists who do their bidding get away with dirty tricks like this.

To understand the provenance of the 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment ordered by then-President Obama and the years of media insanity that followed it, one has to understand the recently declassified HPSCI report and how it came about. What follows is my best attempt at a concise summary of the facts as we have them today.

The Timeline

In November 2016, Donald Trump shocks the world by winning the US Presidential Election. This was mostly a surprise to the Democratic Party, and large parts of the press, who had expected Hillary Clinton to win, mostly based on polling data. Many people with their ear closer to the ground, especially in rural America, had more realistic predictions for the actual outcome of the election, but that is another story.

In the runup of the election, one major talking point of the Democrats was that Russian President Vladimir Putin was intent to manipulate democratic processes and the election to make sure that Trump would win. Clinton started saying that Trump had won because of “the Russians” as soon as it became clear that she had lost. This has been a consistent bugbear of hers ever since.

It was never clearly explained how everyone seemed to know that Putin wanted Trump to win, nor was it ever elucidated why Putin supposedly wanted this. People just assumed that he did and never even entertained the idea that maybe, just maybe, Putin would prefer the very predictable Hillary to emotionally unstable strongman Donald. In any case, the campaign to smear Trump as a Russian asset did not end when he won the election.

In December 2016, Barack Obama, at this point a lame duck President, orders his CIA Director (DCIA), John Brennan, to prepare an Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) on “Russia’s Influence Campaign Targeting the 2016 US Presidential Election”. An Intelligence Community Assessment is a confidential report used to brief the US President, and other select people in his government, on matters of national security. It is usually prepared in conjunction by all 17 intelligence services (often collectively referred to as “the intelligence community”, or “IC”).¹ This specific ICA was apparently put together exclusively at the CIA, with some input by both the FBI and NSA. These kinds of reports are usually written by many different analysts from different agencies working together, and then circulated among the agencies for input before being finalised. In this case, the ICA was compiled by five CIA analysts handpicked by CIA Director Brennan. It was then rushed to be finished, without seeking input from other intelligence services, or even having been properly discussed within the CIA. The HPSCI report says about the process:

Unlike routine IC analysis, the ICA was a high-profile product ordered by the President, 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 apointees, and particularly DCIA. The draft was not properly coordinated within CIA or the IC. Ensuring it would be published without significant challenges to its conclusions.

In January 2017, after the briefing was delivered to both President Obama and President-elect Trump and an unclassified version of the ICA (see 1. in Primary Sources below) was released to the public, contents of the classified version of the Intelligence Community Assessment were leaked to the press within days of President Trump having received the briefing — in what in hindsight clearly looks like a coordinated operation on behalf of President Obama, his team and officials loyal to him (like Brennan). In fact, one must assume that this ICA was only produced with the intent of leaking classified contents to the press.

This initial media coverage, very much according to what must have been the plan all along, kicked off a decade-long bender of press stories about Trump being “a Russian asset” or being “in collusion” with the Russians. Case in point: Rachel Maddow turned her whole show on MSNBC into a daily report on Trump’s alleged ties to the Russian government — for years. This coverage was immediately picked up by media organisations outside of the US and thus mindlessly parroted in other countries, too. My native Germany is an especially heinous example of this, with the press mostly copying US outlets without doing their own reporting (let alone research) and the larger populace being unable or unwilling to read the original English language stories and thus making up their own mind. As a result, the German public, to this day, almost uniformly believes that there is hard evidence for Trump being a Russian agent. But, as it turns out, all of this coverage was based on an Intelligence Community Assessment that is so laughably flimsy that even a congressional report on it had to be kept secret because it exposed how embarrassing this whole thing was for the intelligence services involved.

In March 2017, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) led by Republican Devin Nunes (probably under direct orders from President Trump, who during the ICA briefing must have realised it was based on fabricated evidence) started an investigation into the January 2017 ICA. Part of the team sent to CIA headquarters was the current FBI Director Kashyap “Kash” Patel, then a Nunes aide. The team’s original report on the ICA was not allowed to leave the CIA and was held in a vault at CIA headquarters in Langley until the summer of 2025.

In March 2018, the HPSCI investigation concluded and a month later, a report (see 5. in Primary Sources below) was released, first to members of Congress and then to the public. This report includes some findings from the original report prepared by the Patel team, but this public version is heavily redacted in places and doesn’t go into detail on the sourcing and reasoning of the ICA or specific evidence of Trump’s supposed links to the Russians. The so-called “Nunes memo” (see 4. in Primary Sources below), apparently drafted by Patel, stems from this same timeframe. It centres on a FISA warrant obtained by the FBI to spy on Trump aide Carter Page. That warrant application was supported by information (specifically the so-called “Steele dossier”) from the 2017 ICA; information which Patel and his team knew was bogus from their own investigation.

In July 2025, HPSCI Chairman “Rick” Crawford (Republican) sends a letter to President Donald Trump demanding the release of the original, classified 2018 HPSCI report on the 2017 ICA that is still sitting in a Langley vault (see 6. in Primary Sources below). Crawford wants the report released to Congress and possibly the public. Trump then orders his CIA Director John Ratcliffe to release this document to the HPSCI. Finally, on 22 July 2025, DNI Tulsi Gabbard releases a 2020 version of the HPSCI report on the 2017 ICA to the public (see 2. in Primary Sources below).

How the CIA Made up Bullshit and Made It Stick

When looking at the recently declassified HPSCI report, it becomes clear that despite all the propaganda espoused in countless Hollywood movies and spy novels, people at intelligence agencies like the CIA and the FBI, to a large degree, are simple bureaucrats who shuffle information around in text documents and spreadsheets all day. Far removed from the glamourous image of a James Bond or Jack Ryan, these pencil pushers seem to mostly edit documents and delight in coming up with new acronyms or cryptic inside lingo. And they make mistakes. Or, in this case, cobble together some bullshit because the boss wants a certain report to look a certain way. Somehow, this is a quite comforting thought. Who hasn’t been there? The boss is breathing down your neck and you’re forced to do some shit that is against everyone’s standards, because, you know, you want to keep your job and maybe, just maybe, even get a raise some day. As it turns out, the dudes at the CIA deal with the same shit as every other office worker and just try to get by — even if it is just by the seat of their pants sometimes.

“I mean, it’s like Military Intelligence — the words don’t go together, man.”

— George Carlin

The ICA ordered in 2016 by Obama, and subsequently used as a basis for a briefing to Trump and then almost a decade of press coverage, identifies five pieces of evidence for the idea that Putin wanted Trump to win the 2016 election. The HPSCI report on this ICA does not dispute that Putin wanted to undermine the democratic process in the US and was thus engaged in efforts to have Americans lose faith in their elections. The report does, however, make it clear that all five pieces of intelligence cited as evidence that Putin wanted to get Trump elected, were anything but. The five different pieces of evidence and their provenance are as follows.

1. “The Fragment”

A fragment of a sentence was quoted by the ICA to back up the claim that Russian President Putin “aspired to help Trump’s chances of victory when possible.” The ICA included the following information (the actual sentence fragment from the human intelligence source is in bold):

“Putin had made this decision [to leak DNC emails] after he had come to believe that the Democratic nominee had better odds of winning the U.S. presidential election, and that [candidate Trump], whose victory Putin was counting on, most likely would not be able to pull off a convincing victory.”

Even leaving aside the question of what original Russian sentence this was translated from — and thus differing interpretations based on subtleties in translating from a foreign language — it is not at all clear what “was counting on” means in this context. It could be interpreted as Putin wanting Trump to win and being prepared to do anything to make it happen, as the ICA concludes, but it could also mean that Putin was simply expecting Trump to win. Following the second interpretation, this would make it even less likely for Putin to intervene on Trumps behalf, as he was already convinced Trump would win anyway. The sentence fragment could also mean that Putin was simply betting on Trump to win, without being inclined to take action either way. It seems that within the CIA, the discussion went along much the same lines, with the HPSCI report stating:

A senior CIA operations officer said of the fragment, “We don’t know what was meant by that” and “five people read it five ways.”

Despite internal dissent within the CIA as to what that part of a sentence actually meant, and without elaborating the other interpretation possibilities, the drafters of the 2017 ICA went ahead and picked probably the least likely interpretation to back up the claim that Putin wanted Trump to win. This seems to have happened under the direct stewardship of DCIA Brennan. Additionally, pertinent information about the source of this sentence fragment was left out of the ICA:

The ICA does not address the source’s motivations, which were in part driven by a strong dislike for Putin and his regime, and that the source had an anti-Trump bias, according to CIA officers.

This source, according to the investigation conducted on behalf of HPSCI, only had “second-hand access”. This means the CIA source got the information from another party, which the HPSCI report calls a “sub source”. Even though the original source was reliable and known to the CIA, the Agency did not know how the sub source acquired knowledge of Putin’s plans.

With other words: The only classified HUMINT² used by the CIA as justification for claiming that Putin wanted Trump to be elected is a fragment of a sentence received second-hand from a possibly unreliable, and known to be biased, source that could obviously not explain how he or she happened to know this information. A fragment of a sentence that could very plausibly have been interpreted to mean exactly the opposite of what the ICA claimed it means.

2. Maybe-an-Email

The 2017 ICA claimed that “a Russian political expert possessed a plan that recommended engagement with [Trump’s] team because of the prospects for improved US-Russian relations according to reporting from ██████████³ government service.” This is a gross mischaracterisation of the underlying information the CIA had at the time. The HPSCI report calls the conclusion of the ICA “implausible — if not ridiculous”, and the underlying information it was derived from “unusable”. And for good reason:

The ICA fails to clarify that “the plan” was just an email with no date, not identified sender, no clear recipient, and no classification.

At this point, how do you even know it is and email? It has none of the characteristics that, without access to the original IP packets, make an email and email. At this point, its just text.

The CIA can neither independently vouch for ██████ ███████████████████████ vetting or validation of the ultimate source’s access to the reported information. The document contains no classification. The document did not carry a specific date or identify the originator.

Someone at the CIA, or the originator of the information, could just as well have made this shit up. This isn’t only ridiculous, it is downright laughable. Shit like that got briefed to two presidents? And then served as the basis of almost a decade of press reports? What the fuck.

It seems to simply have been a politically motivated mischaracterisation of the facts that were known to the CIA at the time:

What the ICA calls a Russian “plan” for engagement with Trump was actually an anonymous email proposal to place ██████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████ — on Trump’s “election team” in order to formulate a mutually acceptable agenda between Trump and Putin.

Reading between the lines — and the redactions — in the HPSCI report, the source for this information on the maybe-an-email seems to have been a Ukrainian intelligence service. The report mentions the CIA was aware of “an anti-Trump bias” of the source and the government in Kiev was well known to have had a strong dislike of Trump at the time.

3. The Unknown Source

The ICA quotes a third source to further establish that Putin, his advisers and the rest of the Russian government had “a clear preference” for Trump. According to the ICA, this information came from a HUMINT source characterised as “established” and as having “second-hand access” to “several members of Putin’s inner circle”. According to this source, these Putin confidantes “strongly preferred Republican over Democratic candidates”. It is not made clear why. I guess one is just to take this as established common sense wisdom? As the HPSCI report never tires to point out through its text, usually, such assumptions in intelligence reports are well sourced, examined from all angles and the final conclusion is usually well argued. Not in this case.

When the investigators dug into the underlying report used to justified these conclusions, they found out that it had originally been rejected as unusable by CIA analysts and was dug back up on Brennan’s orders. In fact, the CIA did not know what the source for the report was.

The ultimate source of the information is not known.

Which means they obviously could not verify if the source had access, as was claimed, to Putin’s inner circle. On top of that, the ICA once again had misrepresented the actual underlying intelligence:

The phrase “strongly preferred Republicans” does not appear in the raw intelligence report.

The additional claim that the Kremlin historically preferred Republican presidents is nonsense to anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of Cold War history. The source said this “was because Republicans were ‘less concerned with issues that were unpleasant for Russia such as democracy and human rights’”. As the HPSCI report points out:

The ICA did not take the basic analytic step, however, of comparing the plausibility of the unknown sub source claims to the documented policies of the past three Republican Presidents, all of whom featured democracy and human rights as cornerstones of their foreign policies. It brings to mind President Reagan’s famous quote “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall” or President George W. Bush’s comments on “the axis of evil.”

This intelligence report from an alleged Russian source sounds more like something a Democrat politician from the US would come up with. Personally, I think the people in the Kremlin have more knowledge of history, and keener political sensitivities, than whoever wrote that.

Of course, Obama’s Director of National Intelligence (DNI), James Clapper, was of another opinion. After the publication of the ICA, he was asked to double check this source and responded as follows (from a letter to the HPSCI, dated 12 January 2017):

I have reviewed the underlying source material myself and entirely concur in the judgement of the analysis, which I believe is consistent with standards of analytical tradecraft and objectivity.

There was additional material used to corroborate the original source, but it turned out to be pretty ridiculous: reports that were from a time before Trump was even running, intercepted communications that didn’t mention Trump at all, diplomats citing articles in the US press and even diplomatic cables quoting Russian officials as saying the exact opposite of what the ICA claimed they did.

The HPSCI report then goes on to list CIA and FBI intelligence that, would have it been included in the ICA, led the consumer of the assessment to believe quite the opposite of what Brennan and his colleagues wanted to imply: that the Russians were either indifferent of who won the election or, maybe, even had preferred Hillary to win. It does, in fact seem like Putin had compromising information on Hillary Clinton⁴ beyond what was released from the DNC hack and was holding on to it — because he expected her to win and wanted leverage on her upcoming administration.

A lot of this is based on material from a source called T1, who seems to have provided the FBI with information that was originally obtained by the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (Служба внешней разведки, SVR). This was data that was exfiltrated in a hacker attack on the US government and associated think tanks and allegedly encompasses eight USB thumb drives. The story of these drives, and why they were allegedly never fully examined by US intelligence services, is a long story and one I will look at on another day.

4. Misquoting Russian Analysts

From here on out, the sources quoted by the 2017 ICA get even more absurd. To further prove that the Russian leadership wanted Trump to win, the ICA cited an analysis of the 2016 US Presidential Election by Russian experts on the US political system as evidence of what Putin intended to do. From the redacted 2020 version of the HPSCI report that DNI Gabbard released, it is not clear how the US intelligence community got hold of this analysis. But the HPSCI investigators obviously found the source and the chain of custody of the information credible.

However, the Russian analysts were consistently misquoted in the ICA to make it appear that their analysis supported the agenda of those pushing the ICA, even when that wasn’t the case.

The ICA cites this report using a misleading topic sentence, “We assess that Russian leaders never entirely abandoned hope for a defeat of Secretary Clinton” […] The wording implies that reliable reporting supports the judgement. But the actually cited intelligence says something quite different. Specifically, the raw report:

███████████████ Does not state — nor does it infer — that Russian leaders “never abandoned hope” for defeating Clinton, nor does it even use the word “hope” or similar phrasing. ██

████████████ Does not in any way describe the aspirations, plans or intentions of Putin or other Russian leaders. ██

In fact, the analysis explicitly warns Putin that Trump was “likely to lose [the election] without ‘remarkable compromising material’ on Secretary Clinton that would ‘discredit her completely’”. The HSPCI report shows that the IC knew Putin possessed, what was deemed as just such material, at the time. If he wanted to help Trump, he could have released it in the runup of the election, just as his analysts had suggested. But he didn’t. He held on to it, choosing to not move further against Clinton after the release of the hacked DNC emails from her private server.

The ICA misrepresents the whole raison d’être for the Russian report as some sort of directive issued at Putin. When in fact, Putin was the one in control and was simply being informed of the situation by his underlings.

The assessment is intended to inform Putin of factors that might affect the election, not to tell him what his objectives ought to be.

The Russian governmental system is obviously set up in a way where nobody tells Putin what his objectives ought to be. So this mischaracterisation by the ICA can hardly be an honest mistake; it is deliberate.

5. The Steele Dossier

The last piece of evidence quoted in the 2017 ICA is at the same time the most controversial and the most widely known: The so-called Steele dossier (see 3. in Primary Sources below).

The ICA included a two-page summary of a series of anti-Trump political opposition research reports — which have collectively come to be known as “the dossier” in the media — that was produced on behalf of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and the Clinton campaign — by former British intelligence officer, Christopher Steele. The dossier’s most significant claims — that Russia launched cyber activities to leak political emails — were little more than a regurgitation of stories previously published by multiple media outlets prior to the creation of the dossier. Other dossier reports were either proven false or were unsubstantiated, and these largely disparaged candidate Trump’s character and alleged collusion between him or his campaign and Russian intelligence in a criminal conspiracy to influence the US 2016 election.

Contradicting public claims by the DCIA that the dossier “was not in any way” incorporated into the ICA, the dossier was referenced in the ICA main body text, and further detailed in a two-page ICA annex.

As we can see, DCIA Brennan tried to mislead the public into thinking the Steele Dossier had nothing to do with the ICA when, in fact, it was used in the ICA as evidence to “assess [that an] influence campaign aspired to help [Trump’s] chances of victory”.

By devoting nearly two pages of ICA text to summarizing the dossier in a high-profile assessment intended for the President and President-elect, the ICA misrepresented both the significance and credibility of the dossier reports.

Even though the dossier information itself was unclassified, it was only included in the highly classified version of the ICA that was briefed to Obama and Trump and was excluded from both the Top Secret version released to Congress and the unclassified version that was publicly released. Brennan did this because the FBI and his own CIA analysts knew in December 2016, when the ICA was being prepared, that the Steele dossier was completely fabricated bullshit not worth the paper it was printed on.

The HPSCI report minces no words about the internal thoughts at the CIA about the dossier’s credibility:

CIA analysts and operations officers struggled to explain how the ICA — written for two Presidents and other high-level officials — could have included dossier information without identifying and vetting primary sources and without explaining the political circumstances surrounding why the report was produced and funded.

The ICA sourcing errors involving the dossier violated so many ICD 203⁵ directives, that the text would normally not have passed first-line supervisor review at CIA, FBI or other IC agencies. Moreover, the dossier made outlandish claims and was written in an amateurish conspiracy and political propaganda tone that invited skepticism, if not ridicule, over its content.

Brennan knew this, and when he was internally faced with push-back from “two senior CIA officers […] from Russia operations and from Russia analysis”, he pushed it through regardless. As the HPSCI investigators report:

CIA veterans noted that they could not imagine any previous director allowing such information in a formal CIA product, much less one intended for two Presidents, and then overriding the objections of experienced senior officers to do so.

When challenged on the many known problems with the dossier, Brennan is reported as having replied: “Yes, but doesn’t it ring true?” — In my mind, nothing exemplifies more clearly how the whole exercise of the 2017 ICA was not about including factual information, but rather centred around finding, and exploiting, information that got the desired result, no matter how outlandish it was.

Steele contacting various press outlets while still working with the FBI led to Yahoo! News reporter Michael Isikoff breaking a story about Trump aide Carter Page’s alleged ties to Russia — a story for which, we later found out, Steele was one of the sources.⁶ Meanwhile, anyone with a bit of experience in political matters, and a willingness to remain at least a tiny bit sceptical in the murky world of international espionage, could see that Steele’s material was rubbish. From the HPSCI report:

Even a cursory examination of the dossier documents revealed that the only significant verifiable information had come from media stories.

All of this is to say that the FBI and CIA knew the Steele dossier was a mix of public information, unsubstantiated hearsay and that a lot of it was, most likely, completely made up. And when they actually started checking, this was confirmed. After the 2017 ICA was briefed to Obama and Trump and made a big splash with the media, as part of an FBI investigation, “the FBI met with Mr. Steele’s principal sub source, and found that he did not have access to Russian covert action plans, that he was not credible, and most of what he reported was fabricated or poorly sourced hearsay.”

The HPSCI report makes it clear that people within the CIA knew the dossier was bullshit, but were ordered by Brennan and his confidants to include it in the briefing anyway:

Every CIA analyst and operations officer who was asked about the “dossier” took pains to emphasize that they had nothing to do with the decision to include Annex A, could not vouch for it, did not believe it should have been included, and some CIA officers blamed FBI officials for adding it to the ICA.

Despite the obviously dubious nature of Steele’s information, the ICA tried to pass off the Steele dossier as a credible source to support the useless conclusions it tried to draw from the dossier’s contents.

The ICA […] described dossier information as collected from “a layered network of identified and unidentified sub sources” although the ICA did not clarify that FBI and CIA had so few details on the alleged network, that they didn’t know if this material was all or in part fabricated by Mr. Steele, his sub sources, or if it was Russian disinformation fed to the sub sources.

The ICA claimed the source “collected this information on behalf of private clients” while failing to note those clients — the DNC and the Clinton campaign — were Candidate Trump’s political opponents, information known to the FBI at the time.

The ICA also excluded that the political messaging firm that hired the dossier author, Fusion GPS, was also working on behalf of Russian interests to uncover information that was shared with the Kremlin, raising serious counterintelligence concerns over possible Russian influence on the dossier.

The ICA misleadingly claimed that “the source … was not compensated for [the dossier information] by the FBI,” when in fact the FBI had authorized payment of $25,000 to Mr. Steele for his initial work on the dossier.

It is clear that FBI Director James Comey pushed the dossier to the CIA, where Director John Brennan overruled his experts in having it published. Furthermore, he had it included in the ICA in a way that made it seem like credible intelligence when, in fact, everyone in the know was cognisant of how bogus it was.

You didn’t need access to the wealth of formerly secret information that we have today to realise that the Steele dossier was bullshit. A little bit of critical thinking could have told you that the moment it was first reported on. And many people, me included, pointed this out right away. That didn’t stop the US media from engaging in idiotic and cringey stunts like flying Colbert to Moscow and renting “the pee pee tape hotel room”.

I am pretty sure they would still have done the same thing, even if they’d known for sure at that point, as we know now, that all of this was based on fairy tales. This kind of “reporting”, unfunny humour, or whatever you want to call it, is not about what really happened, it’s about what the people feeding it to you want to have happened. Brennan was right: For them it’s enough that it rings true.

That’s Our Story, and We’re Sticking’ to It

If one is to believe the HPSCI investigation report, which especially in hindsight, seems pretty credible, the 2017 ICA ordered by Obama and produced by Brennan at CIA, with support by Comey at FBI and DNI Clapper, was a purely political product. It seems to have been designed to brief to Trump — who naturally must have known all of it was bullshit — for the express purposes of then leaking the information to the press and kicking off the whole Russiagate debacle. The intelligence used to underpin its assertions was either of dubious providence or clearly fabricated. Actually valid intelligence was either ignored or misquoted in a way to make it appear to say the exact opposite.

Brennan and Clapper made sure the ICA would be published in a way that maximised its exposure to the media and friendly political actors, while at the same time minimising the ability of anyone who went looking for the truth behind the scenes to go digging into the underlying intelligence reports that supported its conclusions.

With three versions of the ICA being published — Top Secret / limited dissemination, Top Secret, and Unclassified — the ICA general conclusions were available to everyone, and the publicity these generated ensured the document was widely read.

The DNI reported that highest classified compartmented version was shared with some 250 US officials, an extraordinarily high number for such a sensitive document.

That the briefing was rushed clearly demonstrates that Obama and his intelligence chiefs meant to use it as a weapon to sabotage the incoming administration.

The ICA classified and unclassified versions were disseminated on 5 and 6 January 2017 — two weeks before the inauguration of President Trump — suggesting that the rushed work schedule was driven by a political motivation to ensure the ICA was rolled out to the Congress and world media by the outgoing administration.

A comprehensive and authoritative review of Russian sctivities for lessons learned purposes could have been done at a deliberate pace, to include a second review by other analysts. The election had passed, and with it, the need for current intelligence updates of the sort produced by the Fusion Cell.⁷

But rushing the production of the ICA also helped DCIA Brennan to control dissent from his own analysts, as well as minimising interference from the FBI, NSA or other parts of the intelligence community.

By finishing the ICA before the new President was inaugurated, the outgoing DCIA retained total control over who could see the raw intelligence cited, who was allowed to review the draft, and what comments would be accepted or rejected.

In fact, as we have seen from emails released by DCI Tulsi Gabbard two days ago, the NSA Director, Admiral Mike Rogers, as late as 22 December 2016 wasn’t even shown “the most sensitive evidence related to the conclusion” of the ICA. In an email, he complains to Clapper, Brennan and Comey that his people did not have sufficient access to the raw intelligence the document was being based on, and that they also did not have enough time to review the information they did have.

Not interested in producing factual information for Obama, but instead wanting a cooked report that could be leaked to the press and used to smear Trump, DCI Clapper brushes these concerns aside in his answer. He tells Rogers that time is of the essence, that the CIA has just delivered the final draft and that everybody needs to get on board. This project was not about getting the facts right or obeying the “normal modalities” of the job, but to produce the thing the boss wanted them to produce. As Comey sums it up, the position is: “that’s OUR story, and we’re sticking’ to it.”

No wonder the NSA never expressed the same confidence in the key findings of the finished intelligence community assessment as the CIA (who mainly produced it) and the FBI (who contributed the controversial Steele dossier).

In Conclusion

This whole thing is a disgrace for the so-called “intelligence community”. There’s a good reason the CIA tried to keep the HPSCI investigation report hidden in its vault. It eviscerates the whole process by which the ICA came about:

Glaring ICA tradecraft errors identified in this investigation might have been caught and corrected by a more unpressured drafting process and a broader-based review by additional working-level analysts outside of the tiny circle handpicked by the outgoing DCIA.

Given the significance of the ICA for America, DCIA’s decision to limit peer review of the ICA — written by just five analysts — cannot be excused by the sensitivity of some reporting used. The CIA should have been subjected to a broader, more deliberate, and more independent review and coordination process. ██

Over 250 people saw the most sensitive final version of the ICA, so it seems reasonable that a second analytic team could have been cleared to see ICA raw source reports, review tradecraft, and consider the ICA’s lack of alternative explanations. ██

The report’s conclusion also delivers some not-so-veiled judgement on Brennan, Clapper and Rogers:

Qualities of character — such as professional ethics and leadership — play a significant role in ensuring that politically controversial assessments are subjected to the highest standards of analytic tradecraft. ██ In offering recommendations, it should be noted that there are limits to what can be achieved by procedural or legislative dictates alone.

With other words: The fish rots from the head.

So there it is. The origins of the Russiagate press scandal laid bare for all to see, in the government’s own words. It does not surprise me in the slightest, that some intelligence agencies would try to massage some crap they found in a bin somewhere with enough force to make some political agenda they got handed by the government stick to the wall long enough to bamboozle most of the the press. These days, it doesn’t even surprise me anymore that the press would swallow it hook, line and sinker. But what still makes me almost physically sick is that, to this day, almost all of the outlets who have peddled this bullshit haven’t apologised to their audience. Most of them have even doubled down on the stupidity. If anyone should be more ashamed than the hacks who came up with this scheme, it’s the hacks who bought it and, in some cases, continue to defend it.

But this whole sad affair also has a silver lining: After much of this information is now out there, we know a hell of a lot more about how these scammers operate. And that they, too, use water to cook up their bullshit reports.

Primary Sources

1. Publicly released version of the 2017 ICA: Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections
2. HPSCI Investigation Report: ICA — Russia’s Influence Campaign Targeting the 2016 US Presidential Election, 2017-2020 (declassified 22 July 2025)
3. The Steele dossier, 2016
4. The Nunes memo, 2018
5. HSPCI Report on Russian Active Measures, 2018
6. Rick Crawford’s letter to President Trump, 2025
7. Intelligence Community Directive 203, 2015