CIA Tradecraft Review: Once Again, "I Told You So."
The Intelligence Community Assessment From 2016 Was The Fake News I Said It Was
My reaction to CIA Director John Ratcliffe’s decision to declassify and publish a “tradecraft review” of the infamous “Intelligence Community Assessment” from 2016 can be summed up in four words: “I told you so.”
Update (July 18)
It was always obvious that the ICA was fake news. Now we learn from DNI Tulsi Gabbard that it may have been a criminal act as well.
On January 6, 2017, just days before President Trump took office, DNI Clapper unveiled the Obama-directed politicized assessment, a gross weaponization of intelligence that laid the groundwork for a years-long coup intended to subvert President Trump’s entire presidency.
According to whistleblower emails shared with us today, we know Clapper and Brennan used the baseless discredited Steele Dossier as a source to push this false narrative in the intelligence assessment.
While such political corruption and likely criminality is appalling, it is not surprising. The ICA was so patently self-serving and propagandaistic that it reeked of corruption from the outset. It was never credible, and never should have been taken seriously.
By far the scariest aspect of the ICA is that it is still well regarded by people who should know better.
The real takeaway from Tulsi Gabbard's thread on X: the Democrats were willing to break any law necessary to bring down President Trump.
Russia Collusion was a criminal conspiracy against President Trump. Which makes the impeachment efforts tantamount to an attempted coup against President Trump.
Which makes all the allegations of rampant vote fraud in 2020 that much more credible.
The entire Democrat establishment knew all of this. This is what they are willing to do to seize political power in this country.
The Democratic Party is a domestic terrorist group, should be designated as such, and prosecuted accordingly.
Starting Point
A simple textual analysis at the time was all I needed to establish the fundamental illegitimacy of the ICA. It was, from the beginning, nothing but “Fake News” and that was exactly what I called it at the time.
During the very crowded news cycles of the past week to ten days, DCI John Ratcliffe confirmed that I was one hundred percent correct: the ICA was garbage.
A bombshell new CIA review of the Obama administration’s spy agencies’ assessment that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election to help Donald Trump was deliberately corrupted by then-CIA Director John Brennan, FBI Director James Comey and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, who were “excessively involved” in its drafting, and rushed its completion in a “chaotic,” “atypical” and “markedly unconventional” process that raised questions of a “potential political motive.”
Corporate media, true to its terminal case of Trump Derangement Syndrome, tries to double down on the ICA by highlighting the Ratcliffe review’s finding that the assessment was “defensible”—which ultimately is more fake news.
But the review did not refute the findings of the 2017 intelligence assessment that Russia waged an information warfare campaign designed to undermine Americans’ confidence in the electoral process, damage Hillary Clinton and boost Donald Trump’s prospects in the 2016 election.
“While the overall assessment was deemed defensible, the identified procedural anomalies and tradecraft issues highlight critical lessons for handling controversial or politically charged topics,” the review said.
When one reads the full paragraph from the review, however, the resulting context and nuance is not at all kind to the the ICA.
The review of the 2016 ICA revealed how departures from established processes and tradecraft standards can affect even fundamentally sound analysis. While the overall assessment was deemed defensible, the identified procedural anomalies and tradecraft issues highlight critical lessons for handling controversial or politically charged topics. Adhering to established analytic processes and rigorous tradecraft is essential to ensure credibility, objectivity, and accuracy—particularly when time pressures, sensitive information, and high-level attention create risks of compromising standard practices.
In other words, the politicking which went on around the ICA’s drafting compromised its objectivity, its credibility, and even its accuracy. Calling it “defensible” means simply that it was an assessment, but it was weak and of minimal value.
Assessments of this sort need to maintain a high degree of objectivity if they are to be useful. DCI Ratcliffe confirms the ICA did not.
ICD 203 stipulates that analysis be “independent of political consideration” and “must not be distorted by, nor shaped for, advocacy of a particular audience, agenda, or policy viewpoint.” The election had concluded, and the ICA was essentially a post-mortem analysis. Therefore, the rushed timeline to publish both classified and unclassified versions before the presidential transition raised questions about a potential political motive behind the White House tasking and timeline.
Nor was there ever any doubt that the ICA was heavily politicized and not at all objective. As I pointed out at the time, that was apparent even in the declassified version’s opening paragraphs.
Thus, even before any examination of the supporting discussion within the report, we are presented with significant challenges to the credibility of the report as a whole. Worse, the imputation of motive is in every context a quintessentially political position: Political figures of all leanings regularly demonize and denigrate their opponents by questioning if not outright attacking their motives; in politics, that is ever the order of things.
DCI Ratcliffe’s review reaches the same conclusion.
Argumentation: In intelligence analysis, presenting a judgment effectively and logically requires clarity, structure, and a robust foundation of evidence and reasoning. Without the highly classified CIA report, the “aspired” judgment essentially rested on an assessment of the public behavior of senior Russian officials and state-controlled media, and on logic. Most analysts judged that denigrating Clinton equaled supporting Trump; they reasoned that in a two-person race the tradeoff was zero-sum. This logic train was plausible and sensible, but was an inference rather than fact sourced to multiple reporting streams.
As we have seen time and again in recent years, narrative collapses when not supported by facts, evidence, and data.
The ICA was a “fact free” assessment in 2017, with no substantive foundation of factual evidence to support its many assertions. It was apparent in 2017 that the ICA was fatally flawed for that very reason. DCI Ratcliffe’s review confirms that the ICA was fatally flawed for that very reason.
We do well to remember that in every knowledge domain there is, opinions are many things, but they are not facts and they are not evidence. We know this to be a fact because there is a body of research evidence confirming this to be a fact1, even for medical researchers and “experts”.
Even “expert” opinions grounded in both factual evidence and experiential knowledge qualify at most as the weakest form of evidence.
Several depictions of the evidence pyramid consider EO as a level of evidence and place it at the bottom of the pyramid as a unique category, or combined with preclinical studies and case reports, implying low validity.
What is true in medicine is equally true in law and in geopolitics: sound rationales and arguments rest on factual evidence, not biased opinions.
In the case of the 2016 ICA, opinions—and in particular then-CIA Director John Brennan’s opinions—formed the foundation of the assessment. The result was an “assessment” that was clearly a political document and not a factual analysis of anything.
This cuts to the heart of why I publish All Facts Matter. Fundamental to all my work is that I am not tied to any particular narrative. Instead, I strive to use the best narrative available to illuminate the underlying facts of a matter.
The work products of government intelligence agencies ideally should be guided by similar principles. An intelligence assessment should not seek to promote a particular political narrative or agenda, but should illuminate what various geopolitical actors are actually doing that impacts various American interests. That is what makes an intelligence assessment a useful and informative document.
The failing of the 2016 ICA was that it demonstrably failed to measure up to that standard. From its opening sentences it was far more focused on advancing a political narrative about Putin as a malicious geopolitical actor rather than illuminating what Putin was actually doing.
As I noted at the time, this resulted in the assessment going down some rather ironic rabbit holes, given the things the intelligence community concluded Putin did not do.
We have an additional problem arising from this aspect of the ICA: How does a foreign leader expressing his or her opinion on our electoral politics delegitimize those politics? How does Putin having a presumed preference for Donald Trump invalidate the votes of tens of millions of Americans for Donald Trump? A moment's reflection is all that is needed to realize that Putin's opinions have no bearing on the legitimacy of our elections, nor on our voting choices. The only thing that would question the legitimacy of an election is if vote totals were altered to present a false result--and the ICA states that did not happen:
DHS assesses that the types of systems we observed Russian actors targeting or compromising are not involved in vote tallying.
By the logic of the ICA itself, the Russians were not compromising either ballots or votes by their actions. And thus the ICA has immediately disproven its own central thesis, that Putin and the Russians sought to undermine Americans' faith in American democratic process. Whatever else the Russians may have done or desired to do, that clearly was not one of the goals and objectives.
For the sake of a narrative, the 2016 ICA contradicted itself at several junctures. For the sake of a narrative, the 2016 ICA sacrificed its own credibility, and this was readily apparent just within the text of the ICA itself.
I said at the time the 2016 ICA was a political document and “Fake News.” Now DCI Ratcliffe is saying that, by the CIA’s own criteria, the 2016 ICA was a political document and “Fake News.”
I told you so.
Ponce, Oscar J et al. “What does expert opinion in guidelines mean? a meta-epidemiological study.” Evidence-based medicine vol. 22,5 (2017): 164-169. doi:10.1136/ebmed-2017-110798
You are certainly entitled to say, “I told you so”, Peter! Your amazing mind is so good that I’m never even mildly surprised when you are right once again. Of course you are.
I’m not a lawyer, and have no idea what crimes the characters like Brennan, Comey, and others can be charged with, legally. But these kinds of political misdeeds are going to keep happening until individuals are prosecuted for their misdeeds - and I’m not interested in their convoluted excuses! We need to be a nation of laws, not political maneuvering.
Corporate Main Stream Media is complicit