CIA Review on Russian Election Interference Investigation: Rushed, Biased, Compromised

Simian Practicalist
2 days ago
3 min read

The CIA Note “Tradecraft Review of the 2016 Intelligence Community Assessment on Russian Election Interference” was released on 2 July 2025, briefly covering what anyone who has been somewhat paying attention already knows: that “Russian President Vladimir Putin ‘aspired’ to help then-candidate Donald Trump win the election” was a hoax.

In May 2025, Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (DCIA) John Ratcliffe tasked CIA’s Directorate of Analysis (DA) to conduct a lessons-learned review of the procedures and analytic tradecraft employed in the highest classified version of the Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) Russia’s Influence Campaign Targeting the 2016 US Presidential Election, dated 30 December 2016.

There were multiple questionable practices so there was zero probability that it was all an accident. The note is 8 pages in length so it is a short and easy read. Merely a few points are reproduced below.

First are the convenient “media leaks suggesting that the IC [Intelligence Community] had already reached definitive conclusions risked creating an anchoring bias”.

On 9 December [2016], both the Washington Post and New York Times reported the IC had concluded with high confidence that Russia had intervened specifically to help Trump win the election. The Post cited an unnamed US official describing this as the IC’s “consensus view.”

Then there was the rushed timeline, which was not justified as the election was over. It was “essentially a post-mortem analysis”.

Multiple IC stakeholders said they felt “jammed” by the compressed timeline. Most got their first look at the hardcopy draft and underlying sensitive reporting just before or at the only in-person coordination meeting that was held on 19 December to conduct a line-by-line review.

There were “compartmentation challenges” with personnel having “uneven access” to information.

One CIA manager stated that uneven access to compartmented information among ICA coordinators and reviewers contributed to an already “chaotic” process. He said some key analysts and managers were not cleared to review the ICA’s most controversial aspects, and were only able to see portions of the draft out of context.

Other inconsistencies included the atypical involvement of agency heads that was “unusual in both scope and intensity”. This would have no doubt influenced the participants and the normal process.

One business day before IC analysts convened for the only coordination session on the ICA, Brennan sent a note to the CIA workforce stating he had met with the DNI and FBI Director and that “there is strong consensus among us on the scope, nature, and intent of Russian interference in our recent Presidential election.” While officers involved in drafting the ICA consistently said they did not feel pressured to reach specific conclusions, Brennan’s premature signaling that agency heads had already reached consensus before the ICA was even coordinated risked stifling analytic debate.

And then there was the so-called Steele Dossier, which CIA’s Deputy Director for Analysis (DDA) warned Brennan that including it risked “the credibility of the entire paper.”

The decision by agency heads to include the Steele Dossier in the ICA ran counter to fundamental tradecraft principles and ultimately undermined the credibility of a key judgment. The ICA authors first learned of the Dossier, and FBI leadership’s insistence on its inclusion, on 20 December—the same day the largely coordinated draft was entering the review process at CIA. FBI leadership made it clear that their participation in the ICA hinged on the Dossier’s inclusion and, over the next few days, repeatedly pushed to weave references to it throughout the main body of the ICA.

There was no “alternative analysis” in which alternative scenarios were explored, presumably due to the rushed timeline. Or was it a form of railroading?

In one instance, the authors cited part of a credibly sourced report that supported the “high confidence” assessment on the first two goals of the Putin-directed campaign—undermining the US democratic process and denigrating Clinton—but omitted information that conflicted with the “aspired” judgment. The omitted information, as well as a small body of other credibly sourced reporting that also was not cited in the ICA, suggested Putin was more ambivalent about which candidate won the election.

The argument was on balance weak, which even senior personnel in the CIA pointed out.

The two senior leaders of the CIA mission center responsible for Russia argued jointly against including the “aspire” judgment. In an email to Brennan on 30 December, they stated the judgment should be removed because it was both weakly supported and unnecessary, given the strength and logic of the paper’s other findings on intent. They warned that including it would only “open up a line of very politicized inquiry.”

Of course, words such as “failures”, “error” or “mistake” are not used in the report but “rushed”, “biased” and “compromised” are.