Top officials in the Obama administration went to extraordinary lengths to promote the Russia collusion hoax, according to a new CIA report.
The report, completed on June 26, 2025, provides a detailed internal review of the Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) issued on December 30, 2016, regarding Russia’s efforts to influence the 2016 election. The agency released a copy of the report to The New York Post.
The new report examines the procedural practices various intelligence agencies used to compile the ICA, which claimed Russian President Vladimir Putin “aspired” to help President Donald Trump win the election. It also promoted the lie that Trump collaborated with the Kremlin to influence the election’s outcome.
The CIA’s report notes that agents rushed to compile the assessment, possibly for political purposes. “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,” according to the new report.
One IC stakeholder put it bluntly: “Multiple IC stakeholders said they felt ‘jammed’ by the compressed timeline.” Another CIA lead author was “surprised that the review process had resulted in so few changes, which was ‘unusual’ for such a lengthy, complex, and high-profile assessment.”
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.
The CIA’s review revealed that only a small group of contributors to the ICA were allowed to access the most sensitive intelligence, which limited debate on the information. “The product spanned multiple CIA compartments, and included restricted access FBI information… Multiple ICA participants had access to intelligence that others did not,” the document reads.
One CIA manager called the process “chaotic” due to the disparities in how agents were able to access critical information.
Then-CIA Director John Brennan played a prominent role in shaping the content of the ICA. The new report states that this level of involvement from someone in Brennan’s position was unusual. “Agency heads chose to marginalize the National Intelligence Council (NIC), departing significantly from standard procedures for formal IC assessments.”
The authors further pointed out that Brennan told the White House the CIA would “take the lead drafting the report” and that the collaboration would only involve the IDNI, CIA, FBI, and NSA.
The report highlighted how atypical it is for top leadership to be involved in the drafting of an ICA. “It also was markedly unconventional to have Agency heads review and sign off on a draft before it was submitted to the NIC for review. The NIC did not receive or even see the final draft until just hours before the ICA was due to be published,” the document read.
Two officials took issue with Brennan’s insistence that the ICA should conclude that Putin aspired to influence the election.
“The two senior leaders of the CIA mission center responsible for Russia argued jointly against including the ‘aspire’ judgment,” the CIA report explained. “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.’”
Even further, the FBI insisted on including information from the widely debunked Steele Dossier, which contained a tranche of unsubstantiated and blatantly false claims about Trump and his relationship to the Russian government. “The ICA authors and multiple senior CIA managers… strongly opposed including the Dossier, asserting that it did not meet even the most basic tradecraft standards,” the report read.
A Deputy Director for Analysis (DDA) told Brennan that the dossier “risk ‘the credibility of the entire paper.”
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.
Still, Brennan refused to relent. “My bottomline is that I believe that the information warrants inclusion in the report,” he responded.
The document further explains that by pushing the idea that Putin “aspired” to swing the election in Trump’s favor, “the ICA implicitly elevated unsubstantiated claims to the status of credible supporting evidence, compromising the analytical integrity of the judgment.”
The document asserts that the process for drafting the ICA was plagued by political motives, senior-level interference, and a flawed methodology for gathering and analyzing information.
CIA Director John Ratcliffe told The New York Post that this was an example of government agencies being weaponized against Trump. “This was Obama, Comey, Clapper and Brennan deciding ‘We’re going to screw Trump,’” he said.
“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,” Ratcliffe continued.
Of course, anyone with an IQ higher than my shoe size could ascertain that government agencies were trying to discredit Trump’s 2016 victory. They sought to do this by deceiving the nation into believing that their new president was a puppet of the Russian government. This report, as well as others, has confirmed this. Yet, so far, there has been no accountability. Perhaps with Trump in office, this could change.
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