Last week, CIA Director John Ratcliffe released a report that, by his account, finally reveals the whole story about one of the most closely scrutinized documents ever produced by American intelligence agencies.
The “CIA Note,” as it’s officially called, is ostensibly an effort to learn lessons from the past, and it might never have been written absent Ratcliffe’s intervention. In May, he ordered CIA analysts to review the “procedures and analytic tradecraft employed” when drafting an assessment that Russia conducted covert operations to influence the 2016 presidential election, intending to damage Hillary Clinton in order to help Donald Trump. These are the conclusions that Trump, for nearly a decade, has called the “Russia Hoax.”
In public remarks, Ratcliffe claimed that his agency’s review proved that Barack Obama–era national-security leaders had created a “politically charged environment” when they produced the assessment, throwing the credibility of their findings in doubt. “All the world can now see the truth,” he wrote in a post on X. The former heads of the FBI and CIA, along with the director of national intelligence, had “manipulated intelligence and silenced career professionals—all to get Trump.”
Those are profound allegations of ethical misconduct and public deception, and they’re particularly serious coming from the CIA director, a historically apolitical office. But you will find scant evidence to support these claims in the report that Ratcliffe now brandishes like a smoking gun.
The note takes issue with some significant aspects of how the intelligence assessment on election interference was drafted—on a short timeline of only a few weeks, with highly sensitive information restricted to a few people, and without a broader, interagency review customary for such grave matters of national interest. CIA analysts also found that one key judgment, on whether Vladimir Putin “aspired” to help Trump win, did not merit the “high confidence” level that the CIA and the FBI gave it. But the note does not refute any earlier findings, including that Russia was responsible for leaking hacked Democratic emails and covertly placing divisive social-media messages, which have been validated by multiple independent inquiries. Notably, a two-year-long investigation by the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee, then chaired by a Republican, actually responds to many of the important questions about process, tradecraft, and analytical integrity that the note purports to ask. “Every witness interviewed by the Committee stated that he or she saw no attempts or pressure to politicize the findings” of the assessment, according to the Senate report, which the eight-page CIA Note doesn’t mention.
The note arrives in a politically charged environment of its own. The president has undermined his director of national intelligence, dismissing her public statements about Iran’s ambitions to build a nuclear weapon. Her office has pressured analysts to alter their findings to suit the president’s policy agenda on immigration. Trump has criticized the work of career analysts whose early, inconclusive findings about the recent bombings of Iranian nuclear facilities were leaked to journalists. The secretary of defense then attacked journalists for reporting about the analysis. Ratcliffe, a former Republican member of Congress, has his own history of politicizing intelligence. And yet, despite this backdrop, it remains remarkable for a CIA director to accuse his predecessors of partisan malfeasance, citing as evidence a document, which he ordered be written, that does not actually say that.
On Tuesday, the director’s apparent motive for the allegation came into focus: Fox News reported that Ratcliffe referred evidence of “potential wrongdoing” to the FBI, which had opened criminal investigations of John Brennan, the former CIA director, and James Comey, who led the FBI during its investigation of election interference by Russia. Fox described the scope of the investigations as “unclear,” but pointed out that Ratcliffe had just released the CIA Note, which found that officials “diverted from intelligence standards.”
The note itself is focused mainly on process and does not attempt to relitigate the original assessment. But in commissioning it and then deciding to release it, Ratcliffe all but ensured that it would be used for political ammunition more than critical reflection. Current and former officials I spoke with said they could not recall a tradecraft review ever being declassified and made public. The note’s authors, whom Ratcliffe says are career CIA officers, take pains to credit the overall integrity of the assessment while dutifully nitpicking procedural issues that did nothing to compromise the conclusions. This may be in the spirit of improving analysis. But at times, the note feels like the written version of a hostage video.
“It is virtually unprecedented to conduct a review of the analytic tradecraft used in an intelligence product more than 8 years after its publication,” James Clapper, who, as the director of national intelligence, oversaw the election interference assessment, told me in a written statement. The CIA did not interview Clapper for its review, nor did it speak with Brennan or Comey. Ratcliffe publicly accused all three men by name of manipulating intelligence.
“We empathize with the very difficult position in which the career professionals who drafted the CIA Note were placed,” Clapper told me, adding that he spoke for Brennan as well. “It is hard, however, to ignore the irony of a document purporting to champion the highest standards of intelligence analytic integrity, which itself violated those very standards.”
Liz Lyons, a CIA spokesperson, told me in a statement that Ratcliffe took office determined “to end the weaponization of intelligence while ensuring rigorous analytic objectivity.”
“At CIA, we have a sacred duty to speak truth to power,” she said, but the agency’s review “found that when career professionals raised legitimate tradecraft concerns, those in power purposely dismissed these concerns …The charge that he is the problem, rather than part of the solution, is beyond absurd.”
Among those in power were Brennan and other intelligence-agency leaders who draw particular scrutiny from the note’s authors. Under ordinary circumstances, the head of an agency might review the final language in a document of such sensitivity as the assessment. But top leaders, who are politically appointed, would not get involved in the drafting. In this case, they did, and the note’s authors say that this “direct engagement” was “highly unusual in both scope and intensity.” They add that it “likely influenced participants, altered normal review processes, and ultimately compromised analytic rigor.”
That’s an unquestionably bad outcome. But the document offers no evidence that any analysts changed their views or hedged their conclusions because these high-level officials took an interest in the work—which had, after all, been directed by Obama, who wanted an assessment completed before Trump’s inauguration. Had the authors spoken with Brennan or Clapper, the former directors might have said that they had “empowered the analysts to drive the process” in light of their subject-matter expertise with Russia, and asserted that their own involvement in the production of the assessment “was minimal.” That’s at least what their lawyer, Kenneth Wainstein, wrote in a letter summarizing their lengthy interviews with John Durham, the Justice Department special counsel who exhaustively investigated the FBI’s probe of Russian interference. I obtained a copy of the letter, sent in 2022, that has not previously been reported.
“Prior to the publication of the [assessment], Director Brennan met with the participating CIA analysts on one occasion, for approximately an hour and a half, to discuss the ICA draft,” Wainstein wrote, using the initialism for intelligence-community assessment.
He continued, “During that meeting, Director Brennan discussed the analysts’ findings and some of the specific intelligence they relied upon, but made no changes to their analysis or findings, believing that the analysts were best positioned to make those judgments.”
Durham’s final report did not dispute the assessment’s findings. Nor did it take issue with how the document was constructed, to the lingering disappointment of many Trump supporters who had hoped the special counsel would blame politically motivated partisans for spinning up the “Russia Hoax”—not unlike what Ratcliffe is doing now.
One of the note’s more confounding sections concerns the Steele dossier, that set of salacious and unverified allegations—some of them since disproved—about Trump’s misconduct with Russians and their supposed sinister ties to his campaign. The dossier, which began as Democratic-funded opposition research, remains a touchstone for those who believe that the intelligence analysis, as well as the FBI’s investigation of Russia’s actions, were politically influenced.
“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 note states.
To be clear the dossier is not included in the body of the assessment. A two-page summary was attached as an appendix to a highly classified version, distributed to a relatively small number of U.S. officials, with the caveat that the Steele material played no role in the analysis. This was a compromise reached with the FBI, whose leaders pushed to include the Steele material in the text of the assessment itself, over the strong objection of CIA analysts, arguing that Obama had ordered a complete accounting of everything that was known about possible connections between the Trump campaign and Russia. (A public version of the assessment, stripped of sensitive source material, doesn’t mention the dossier at all.)
The Senate investigation recounts in detail how intelligence leaders debated the best way to handle the dossier, which, in late 2016, was making its way into the hands of journalists around Washington, D.C., including mine. “Initially [the] FBI wanted it incorporated into the assessment itself. We all pushed back on that,” Brennan told the committee. The back-and-forth led to a “brief interagency standoff,” according to Wainstein’s letter to Durham. Ultimately, Brennan told the committee, Comey made a persuasive argument that the dossier should accompany the assessment in some way, and the leaders agreed to the summary. “The irony is that my clients—the two principal leaders of the Intelligence Community—prevented the Steele dossier from playing any role in the ICA analysis,” Wainstein wrote. Durham did not find otherwise.
The agency leaders reached their compromise in late December 2016. According to the note, the CIA deputy director in charge of analysis, a very senior official, sent an email to Brennan warning that any mention of the dossier could impugn “the credibility of the entire paper.” But Brennan “appeared more swayed by the Dossier’s general conformity with existing theories than by legitimate tradecraft concerns,” the note states. “Brennan ultimately formalized his position in writing, stating that ‘my bottomline is that I believe that the information warrants inclusion in the report.’”
This is where the authors of the note appear to think that Brennan put his thumb on the scales, by agreeing to include the Steele material over the strenuous objections of analysts, whom he had supposedly empowered to make their own judgments. The decision-making around the Steee dossier’s inclusion in the assessment may well be a focus of the FBI’s criminal investigation. But the Note, at least, fails to fully capture how the agency heads ultimately arrived at their decision. That context is relevant.
Comey later told Trump about the dossier in a private meeting after the election. Clapper told me that one reason for only briefly mentioning it in the highly classified version of the assessment was “to limit potential embarrassment to the President-elect.” A few years later, the annex describing the Steele dossier was declassified and publicly released—by John Ratcliffe, who was the director of national intelligence in Trump’s first term.
During his brief tenure in that position, and years earlier as a member of Congress, Ratcliffe affirmed many times that he agreed with at least one part of the assessment: that Russia had interfered in the election. But he avoided any public comment about its most divisive finding—that the Russians were trying to help Trump win.
It’s no secret why. The mere suggestion that Russia preferred Trump, and tried to help him, uniquely incenses the president. As I wrote in a profile of Ratcliffe last year, if he had publicly said that he agreed with that conclusion, he would not be serving in Trump’s Cabinet today.
The CIA Note, according to its authors, “focused particular attention on the ICA’s most debated judgment—that Russian President Vladimir Putin ‘aspired’ to help then-candidate Donald Trump win the election.” The authors argue, convincingly, that more time and a wider circle of analysts “would have led to more robust analytic debate.”
But they don’t conclude that the finding was wrong. For all the ways that the note overlooks history, it does not rewrite it—which is apparently what Ratcliffe wants to do.
