CIAmerica
In a new report, the CIA’s Deputy Director for Analysis explains that senior leaders of the agency’s center on Russia “strongly opposed” the now-infamous Steele dossier, which was advanced by former British spy Christopher Steele and deployed as the backbone of the agency’s investigation of so-called Russian collusion in the 2016 election. Officials with the CIA’s center on Russia said of the dossier that it “did not meet even the most basic tradecraft standards” and contended that its inclusion in the Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) of the 2016 election would “jeopardize the credibility of the entire paper.”
According to the declassified CIA report released last week, John Brennan, who was the CIA director from 2013 to 2017:
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 bottom line is that I believe that the information warrants inclusion in the report.”
Former CIA analyst Bryan Dean Wright, who served under Brennan, opined at Fox News that the CIA report shows that his former boss lied about his use of the dossier, manipulated who would write the ICA, interfered in its drafting, rushed the document to completion, and shared it with more than 200 U.S. officials to ensure that it would be leaked. Wright concluded that based on the information in the report, Brennan, who is 69 years old and retired, should be in prison.
To those who have been paying attention for the last several years, none of what the report reveals should come as a surprise.
“Vladimir Putin personally ordered the influence campaign to boost Donald Trump’s election prospects,” Brennan contended in his 2020 book Undaunted: My Fight Against America’s Enemies, at Home and Abroad. By then, the Russia hoax had been fully exposed as a Clinton campaign operation. Brennan repeats the hoax’s narrative many times in his book, which serves as a confession of the CIA’s aggressive partisanship under his leadership, and its abject failure to fulfill its appointed duties.
For a better chronicle of the agency
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