Former CIA Director John Brennan revealed he overruled two CIA officers who disagreed with him during the creation of the Intelligence Community Assessment of 2017 about his high level of confidence that Russian President Vladimir Putin interfered in 2016’s presidential election with the specific goal of helping elect then-candidate Donald Trump.
Brennan, who served as President Barack Obama’s CIA chief beginning in 2013 and has emerged as a harsh Trump critic since 2016, is slated to release his memoir, Undaunted: My Fight Against America’s Enemies At Home and Abroad, on Tuesday, and outlets that got a sneak peek reported there was internal CIA conflict over how confident the agency was over Russia’s true intentions in 2016.
Brennan “disagreed with the recommendation of two senior officers in early 2017 who wanted to override intelligence analysts’ determination that the agency had high confidence in one of its major judgments in the assessment of Russia’s 2016 election interference” — that Putin actively tried to help Trump and harm Clinton, according to the New York Times. After a “team of more than a dozen agency analysts made its initial draft assessment,” the report said, “two more senior officers in the mission center that oversaw intelligence on Russia expressed concerns to” Brennan and “the two officers, one an analyst and the other with a background in operations, suggested the confidence level be reduced to moderate.” Brennan “said he had been reviewing new intelligence about Russian interference since the summer of 2016 and was steeped in the material” and “he realized they may not have seen all of the material that he and the analysts who wrote the initial conclusion had reviewed.” Brennan justified his overruling of the two CIA officers by saying he was “not intervening for political reasons” and that “the quality of the sources justified the high confidence.”
The January 2017 assessment from the CIA, the National Security Agency, and the FBI concluded with “high confidence” that Putin “ordered an influence campaign in 2016” and that Russia worked to “undermine public faith in the U.S. democratic process, denigrate former Secretary of State [Hillary] Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency” and “developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump.” Adm. Mike Rogers of the NSA diverged from Brennan and FBI Director James Comey on one key aspect, expressing only “moderate confidence” rather than “high confidence” that Putin “aspired to help” Trump’s election chances by “discrediting” Clinton “and publicly contrasting her unfavorably to him.”
Rogers talked about his view on the assessment during testimony before the Senate in May 2017, noting that sourcing was a factor in his judgment.
“I wouldn’t call it a discrepancy. I’d call it an honest difference of opinion between three different organizations, and in the end, I made that call,” Rogers said. “When I looked at all of the available data, I was struck by, for every other key judgment in the report, I had multiple sources, multiple disciplines, and I was able to remove almost every other alternative rationale that I could come up with in my mind for, well, could there be another reason to explain this. In the case of that one particular point, it didn’t have the same level of sourcing and the same level of multiple sources from different perspectives — you know, human intelligence, signals intelligence.”
Brennan told C-SPAN’s Book TV for an upcoming episode that two CIA officers “came up and talked to me about” their belief that he was wrong to be so confident about Putin’s motivations. “I encouraged them to talk to the authors of the assessment and determine if the judgment should stay at high confidence or medium confidence,” he said. “In my conversation with them, it was apparent to me, and I say in the book, that they had not read all the intelligence that I had read, so my own view was to support the analysts,” the former CIA director said, adding, “I didn’t change a single analytic judgment in that intelligence community assessment.”
The Senate Intelligence Committee released a bipartisan report in April defending the 2017 assessment. The panel said congressional investigators found no evidence of political pressure and determined the assessment “presents a coherent and well-constructed intelligence basis for the case of unprecedented Russian interference.” The senators also found that “the differing confidence levels on one analytic judgment are justified and properly represented.”
The Senate findings clash with a 2018 report from the House Intelligence Committee, chaired at the time by California Republican Devin Nunes, which concluded that “the majority of the Intelligence Community Assessment judgments on Russia’s election activities employed proper analytic tradecraft” but the “judgments on Putin’s strategic intentions did not.” The House report said it “identified significant intelligence tradecraft failings that undermine confidence in the ICA judgments regarding Putin’s strategic objectives.” That report was not bipartisan.
Attorney General William Barr confirmed earlier this summer that U.S. Attorney John Durham’s inquiry into the federal Russia investigation includes a deep dive into the 2017 intelligence community assessment.
“There was definitely Russian interference,” Barr said in June. “I think Durham is looking at the intelligence community’s ICA — the report that they did in December [2016]. And he’s sort of examining all the information that was based on, the basis for their conclusions. So to that extent, I still have an open mind, depending on what he finds.”
Durham has interviewed Rogers and Brennan and is looking into whether the CIA director took politicized actions to pressure the rest of the intelligence community to match his conclusions about Putin’s motivations. The prosecutor is reportedly reviewing Brennan’s handling of a secret source said to be close to the Kremlin, and Durham wants to know what role that person’s information played in the assessment. Durham is also said to have scrutinized Brennan along with the FBI in relation to British ex-spy Christopher Steele’s discredited dossier. DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s December report noted the CIA had dismissed the dossier’s claims as “internet rumor.”
Brennan, Rogers, and Comey, along with Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, briefed President-elect Trump about their assessment at Trump Tower in early January 2017, and Comey stayed behind to tell Trump about some of the dossier’s more salacious allegations. Recently declassified footnotes showed the FBI became aware that Steele’s dossier may have been compromised by Russian disinformation and that the dossier’s main source undercut its reliability and credibility.
The Atlantic reported that Brennan “bets” that Durham’s investigation will ultimately “criticize him for a decision … to overrule two CIA case officers specializing in Eurasia, who tried to dissuade him from accepting CIA analysts’ assessment that Putin wasn’t just interested in mucking up the election, but in doing so specifically to benefit Trump.” The outlet quotes Brennan as saying that siding with those two CIA officers would have been “a very inappropriate action” and that “I’m not going to tell” the original CIA analytic team “to change their judgment because you two folks who are now looking at stuff for a brief period of time believe that it should be changed” because “that would be a corruption of the analytic intelligence process.”
Robert Mueller’s special counsel investigation concluded that Russia interfered in the 2016 election in a “sweeping and systematic fashion” but “did not establish” any criminal conspiracy between the Russians and the Trump campaign.
