Former communist and CIA Director John Brennan and other top federal officials likely lied to Congress when they said that the notorious and mendacious Steele Dossier — the Hillary Clinton presidential-campaign hit job that accused of Donald Trump of colluding with Russia to defeat Clinton — wasn’t foundational for their ridiculous, years-long probe into the so-called collusion.
The evidence is a newly released CIA “Tradecraft Review.”
Writing at RealClearInvestigations, reporter Paul Sperry has disclosed the disturbing truth. “The eight-page review conducted by career CIA analysts found the dossier did, in fact, worm its way into the text of the highly classified report known as an Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) to buttress the thinly sourced, yet inflammatory allegation that ‘Putin and the Russian Government aspired to help President-elect Trump’s election chances,’” he wrote.
The revelation could be big trouble for Brennan, along with former FBI chief James Comey and his deputy, Andrew McCabe, and James Clapper, former director of national intelligence (DNI). All four served in Barack Hussein Obama’s administration.
Smoking Gun
“The CIA’s ‘lessons-learned’ report contradicts Obama administration officials’ claims — most of which were made under oath — that they did not use the since-debunked dossier,” Sperry wrote.
For instance, in sworn testimony before the House Intelligence Committee in May 2017, Brennan claimed that December 2016’s ICA did not “in any way” use the dossier. He lied again in 2023. “The CIA was very much opposed to having any reference or inclusion of the Steele dossier in the Intelligence Community Assessment,” he told the House Judiciary Committee that May.
Clapper was in on the Big Lie, too.
“We did not rely upon [the dossier] in any way for our conclusions,” Clapper said in January 2017. “Several months later, he assured Congress the dossier was ‘not a formal part of the Intelligence Community Assessment,’” Sperry explained:
More recently, Clapper also swore, “We didn’t use [the dossier] in our Intelligence Community Assessment” and “We didn’t use it for the Intelligence Community Assessment, we didn’t draw on it.” [Emphasis added.] In the same May 2023 House Judiciary interview, which was conducted in closed session but during which he was advised of federal perjury laws, he expounded that “the team that put together the Intelligence Community Assessment was not to draw on it as a source for the Intelligence Community Assessment. So you won’t find a footnote using the dossier as a source.”
Likewise, in a deposition in December 2017, Sperry reported, FBI Deputy Director McCabe claimed that the dossier was not “referred to ‘in the main body’” of the ICA. Instead, he said, it “was appended to the classified version.”
That segues to McCabe’s boss, Comey, who told the Senate Judiciary Committee in September 2020 that the dossier
was significant enough and consistent enough with other intelligence that it ought to be included, but it wasn’t sufficiently corroborated to be in the body of the Intelligence Community Assessment.
The CIA review shows that the unverified and now-debunked dossier was used as support for the intelligence analysis, not just as a sidebar as Obama officials have maintained. And they relied on it to back the most inflammatory finding in the intelligence report.
The new report also raises fresh questions about the candor of the Obama administration’s top intel operatives and whether they politicized intelligence to paint incoming GOP President Donald Trump as compromised by the Kremlin.
In an X post last week, deputy CIA Director Michael Ellis said newly declassified CIA emails “show how Brennan personally intervened to insert the Steele dossier’s lies into intelligence analysis” over the objections of his top Russia analysts at Langley.
“We must have zero tolerance for the weaponization of intelligence,” Ellis wrote.
The CIA review of the scandal reports thusly: Brennan rammed the dossier into the ICA:
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.
The review avers on page four that
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.
On page five, as Sperry noted, it reads:
Ultimately, agency heads decided to include a two-page summary of the dossier as an annex to the ICA, with a disclaimer that the material was not used ‘to reach the analytic conclusions.’ However, by placing a reference to the annex material in the main body of the ICA as the fourth supporting bullet for the judgment that Putin ‘aspired’ to help Trump win, the ICA implicitly elevated [the dossier’s] unsubstantiated claims to the status of credible supporting evidence, compromising the analytical integrity of the judgment.
They Knew Clinton Was Behind the Hoax
Frighteningly, Brennan and the gang, as well as President Obama, knew the Steele Dossier was a Clinton campaign whack job. Indeed, she personally approved it. Brennan’s handwritten notes after a meeting with Obama in July 2016, months before the hate-Trump ICA was finalized in December, explained what everyone knew.
Wrote Brennan:
We’re getting additional insight into Russian activities from [REDACTED]….
“CITE [summarizing] alleged approved by Hillary Clinton a proposal from one of her foreign policy advisers to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by the Russian security service.…
Any evidence of collaboration between Trump campaign + Russia
In a letter to then-Senate Intelligence Committee chief Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, then-DNI John Ratcliffe disclosed the disturbing truth about the hoax, writing that Brennan
briefed President Obama and other senior national security officials on the intelligence, including the “alleged approval by Hillary Clinton on July 26, 2016 of a proposal from one of her foreign policy advisors to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by Russian security services.”
With help from a Russian spy, British agent Christopher Steele concocted his infamous dossier for a Clinton campaign cutout, Fusion GPS. In 2022, The Federal Election Commission fined the campaign and the Democratic National Committee for lying about payments to Fusion.
Trump sued the principals who conceived the hoax.
