Miranda Devine is sort of the opposite-world version of CNN's Natasha Bertrand in that Devine's stuff turns out to be true.
You might remember her for breaking the stories of Papa Biden's corruption exposed by Hunter Biden's laptop computer in mid-October 2020. That was followed by Bertrand's release of the 51-Spies-who-lie letter calling the laptop news a Russian disinformation operation.
The back-and-forth between the two over the ensuing years is quite the story in itself.
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.”
Further, Brennan’s decision to include the discredited Steele
dossier, over the objections of the CIA’s most senior Russia experts,
“undermined the credibility” of the assessment.
The “Tradecraft Review of the 2016 Intelligence Community Assessment
[ICA] on Russian Election Interference” was conducted by career
professionals at the CIA’s Directorate of Analysis and was commissioned
by CIA Director John Ratcliffe in May.
Embedded CIA report "Tradecraft Review of the 2016 Intelligence Community Assessment on Russian Election Interference" via Scribed.
The “lessons-learned review” found that, on December 6, 2016, six weeks
before his presidency ended, Barack Obama ordered the assessment, which
concluded that Russian President Vladimir Putin “aspired” to help Trump
win the election.
The review identified “multiple procedural anomalies” that undermined
the credibility of the ICA, including “a highly compressed production
timeline, stringent compartmentation, and excessive involvement of
agency heads.”
It also questioned the exclusion of key intelligence agencies and
said media leaks may have influenced analysts to conform to a false
narrative of Trump-Russia collusion.
“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.”
The review found that Brennan directed the compilation of the ICA,
and that his, Comey’s and Clapper’s “direct engagement in the ICA’s
development was highly unusual in both scope and intensity” and ”risked
stifling analytic debate.”
Brennan handpicked the CIA analysts to compile the ICA and involved
only the ODNI, CIA, FBI and NSA, excluding 13 of the then-17
intelligence agencies.
He sidelined the National Intelligence Council and forced the
inclusion of the discredited Steele dossier despite objections of the
authors and senior CIA Russia experts, so as to push a false narrative
that Russia secured Trump’s 2016 victory.
“This was Obama, Comey, Clapper and Brennan deciding ‘We’re going to screw Trump,’” said Ratcliffe in an exclusive interview.
“It was, ‘We’re going to create this and put the imprimatur of an IC
assessment in a way that nobody can question it.’ They stamped it as
Russian collusion and then classified it so nobody could see it.
“This led to Mueller [special counsel Robert Mueller’s inquiry, which
concluded after two years that there was no Trump-Russia collusion]. It
put the seal of approval of the intelligence community that Russia was
helping Trump and that the Steele dossier was the scandal of our
lifetime. It ate up the first two years of his [Trump’s first]
presidency.
“You see how Brennan and Clapper and Comey manipulated [and] silenced all the career professionals and railroaded the process.”
The CIA review notes that, before work even began on the ICA, “media
leaks suggesting that the Intelligence Community had already reached
definitive conclusions risked creating an anchoring.”
The term “anchoring” refers to a cognitive bias in psychology and
suggests that the media leaks may have influenced the analysts
working on the ICA to shape their findings to conform with the leaked
narrative rather than conducting an objective analysis.
On December 9, 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.”
The “highly compressed timeline was atypical for a formal IC
assessment which ordinarily can take months to prepare, especially for
assessments of such length, complexity, and political sensitivity,” the
review found. “CIA’s primary authors had less than a week to draft the
assessment and less than two days to formally coordinate it with IC
peers before it entered the formal review process at CIA on December
20.”
When the draft ICA was completed and sent for review to Intelligence
Community “stakeholders,” the timeline was “compressed to just a handful
of days during a holiday week [which] created numerous challenges …
“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 December 19 to conduct a line-by-line review.”
Drafts of the ICA were only permitted in hard copy, so needed to be
hand-carried between various spy agency buildings. “The pressing
timeline and limitations of hardcopy review likely biased the overall
review process.”
The “direct engagement” of agency heads Brennan, Comey and Clapper in
the ICA’s development was “highly unusual in both scope and intensity.
This exceptional level of senior involvement likely influenced
participants, altered normal review processes, and ultimately
compromised analytic rigor.
“One CIA analytic manager involved in the process said other analytic
managers — who would typically have been part of the review chain —
opted out due to the politically charged environment and the atypical
prominence of agency leadership in the process.”
The review criticizes the ICA for including the Steele dossier, a
salacious and discredited opposition-research product written by former
British spy Christopher Steele, who was working for the Hillary Clinton
campaign, which claimed Russia possessed sexually compromising blackmail
material on Trump.
Despite the fact that “the ICA authors and multiple senior CIA
managers — including the two senior leaders of the CIA mission center
responsible for Russia — strongly opposed including the Dossier,
asserting that it did not meet even the most basic tradecraft
standards,” Brennan insisted it be included.
“CIA’s Deputy Director for Analysis (DDA) warned in an email to
Brennan on December 29 that including it in any form risked ‘the
credibility of the entire paper.’”
But Brennan responded that “my bottom line is that I believe that the information warrants inclusion in the report.”
Brennan showed “a preference for narrative consistency over analytical soundness,” said the review.
“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.”
“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 December 20 — the same day the largely coordinated draft
was entering the review process at CIA,” according to the review. “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.”
In the end, the spy agency heads decided to include a two-page
summary of the Steele dossier as an “annex” to the ICA, with a
disclaimer that the material was not used “to reach the analytic
conclusions.”
However, the review says that “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 unsubstantiated claims to the status of credible supporting
evidence, compromising the analytical integrity of the judgment.”....
If interested here is the Washington Post on Bertrand's role in the Steele Dossier, February 28, 2020:
Long-time readers might recall our thoughts upon reading the Dossier, January 13, 2017, three days after BuzzFeed broke the story and a week before Trump's inauguration:
