The Republican chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence has sent a letter directly to President Donald Trump telling him that CIA Director John Ratcliffe’s recent memo – which offered some critiques of the U.S. intelligence community’s assessment of Russian meddling in the 2016 election – was a “whitewash” that “protects the deep state,” Just the News learned Thursday.

Ratcliffe on Wednesday morning released a “lessons learned” review of the December 2016 Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) on Russian influence in the November 2016 election, including critiquing the “high confidence” assessment by the FBI and the CIA that Russian leader Vladimir Putin had “aspired” to help Trump win the race against Democratic presidential nominee former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

But the CIA’s review – put together by the CIA's Directorate of Analysis (DA) at Ratcliffe’s direction – also stated that the review’s findings “should not be interpreted as indicative of broader systemic problems in the IC's analytic processes or standards.”

Rep. Rick Crawford, chairman of the House Intelligence panel, took his concerns with the review’s conclusions directly to Trump in a letter Wednesday evening that contained rare but stark criticisms of the Republican CIA director by the Republican intelligence panel chairman.

“While I am pleased to see CIA take the first step of acknowledging the political abuse and tradecraft problems associated with the 2016 ICA, I am disappointed that the Agency was permitted to whitewash the full extent of their problems,” Crawford wrote to Trump, adding that “I write to report to you that this review fails to disclose critical information, offers misleading judgements, and protects the deep state.”

Crawford sent a copy of his letter to Ratcliffe, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, and Secretary of State and National Security Adviser Marco Rubio.

The CIA did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Just the News.

CIA’s “self-review … falls short of the full truth”

Ratcliffe’s review criticized then-CIA Director John Brennan for allegedly joining since-fired FBI Director James Comey in pushing to include British ex-spy Christopher Steele’s baseless anti-Trump dossier in the ICA and concluded 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.”

“The procedural anomalies that characterized the ICA’s development had a direct impact on the tradecraft applied to its most contentious finding. With analysts operating under severe time constraints, limited information sharing, and heightened senior-level scrutiny, several aspects of tradecraft rigor were compromised—particularly in supporting the judgment that Putin ‘aspired’ to help Trump win,” the lessons learned report from the CIA found. 

“The DA Review identified multiple specific concerns, including: a higher confidence level than was justified; insufficient exploration of alternative scenarios; lack of transparency on source uncertainty; uneven argumentation; and the inclusion of unsubstantiated Steele Dossier material.”

Ratcliffe tweeted on Wednesday that Trump “has trusted me with helping to end weaponization of U.S. intelligence” and that “today's report underscores that the 2016 IC Assessment was conducted through an atypical & corrupt process under the politically charged environments” of Brennan & since-fired FBI Director James Comey."

CIA Deputy Director Michael Ellis also tweeted Wednesday that newly-declassified documents “show how Brennan and Comey personally intervened to insert the Steele dossier's lies into intelligence analysis. We must have zero tolerance for the weaponization of intelligence.”

But the Republican leader of HPSCI told Trump on Wednesday evening that Ratcliffe’s review had not gone nearly far enough. Crawford also told Just the News on Thursday that the CIA’s “self-review … falls far short of the full truth.”

“It was abysmal that they would put out a memo with half-truths, inaccuracies, and blatant omissions about the full extent of the Russia hoax and the deep state’s role,” Crawford told Just the News. “Even worse, they released this report while holding the Intel Committee’s report on the same issue hostage for seven years.”

Crawford told Just the News that “I refuse to let this Committee become part of the problem that envelopes parts of the IC, including senior leadership who seek to thwart the President’s agenda.

“This memo from the CIA directly undermines President Trump and legitimizes the Russia hoax that was pushed against him,” a Republican HPSCI staffer told Just the News on Thursday. “This is out of the deep state’s playbook.”

The HPSCI staffer said the CIA’s review “knowingly fails to provide the entire and accurate picture” and that HPSCI’s own report from 2018 “is in direct, 180 contrast to what the CIA now put out.” 

The intelligence committee staffer said that “the conclusions buried in the report are extremely problematic” and pointed to two specific examples from Wednesday’s CIA review.

The CIA lessons learned memo stated that “while the DA Review identified specific procedural and tradecraft issues with the one judgment, these issues should not be interpreted as indicative of broader systemic problems in the IC's analytic processes or standards.” The CIA review also found that “while the overall assessment was deemed defensible, the identified procedural anomalies and tradecraft issues highlight critical lessons for handling controversial or politically charged topics.”

The HPSCI staffer said that the CIA review’s downplaying of potential “broader systemic problems” with the intelligence community’s other analyses and the agency’s conclusion that the overall ICA was “deemed defensible” were both “in direct conflict” with what HPSCI’s own 2018 report says.

House Intel Committee’s yet-secret report on Russia & 2016

Crawford’s Wednesday letter told Trump that the CIA “has in its possession” a years-old HPSCI staff report that “exposes the truth” about the “politically driven Obama-era assessment” that “Putin and the Russian Government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump.”

The HPSCI chairman noted that the report was produced in 2018 during the 116th Congress under the leadership of then-Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) “despite extraordinary restrictions imposed by CIA.” 

Crawford said the non-public report “documents efforts within the CIA to manufacture the Trump-Russia collusion narrative and must not be locked away indefinitely.”

Crawford appealed to Trump to read the HPSCI report to see how it differs from the newly-released CIA review, and to make the HPSCI report available to the public.

“Mr. President, given the differences between the CIA's self-assessment of the 2016 ICA process and that of the HPSCI, I urge you to read our report,” he wrote. “In my view, public interest declassification is merited, as I have discussed and supported with CIA leadership.”

Crawford told Trump that restrictions on the Nunes-era HPSCI report included a “prohibition on transporting the final document to our secure spaces on Capitol Hill” and so “as a result, very few people have been able to review it.”

“Once I assumed the Chairmanship of HPSCI, one of my first priorities was to get this staff report transferred to our possession. It is a congressional document related to a congressional investigation,” Crawford told Trump. “To that end and following extensive discussions with CIA, I wrote a letter to Director Ratcliffe seeking the immediate transfer of the congressional document to HPSCI.”

The HPSCI chairman told the president that his letter to Ratcliffe was transmitted in early March and that, as of Wednesday night, and “despite repeated engagements, we still do not have our report.” 

Crawford told Trump that “I ask for your help in achieving” the “delivery of this congressional report to the HPSCI as soon as possible.”

It was revealed to Just the News on Thursday that Crawford’s letter had prompted the CIA to agree to hand over the 2018 HPSCI report.

“Thanks to the swift response from President Trump and the White House after receiving my letter, our investigative document on the Russia hoax has been handed over by the CIA and is back in the Committee’s custody after seven years,” Crawford told Just the News.

The HPSCI staffer told Just the News on Thursday afternoon that HPSCI staff was on its way to the CIA to pick up the report.

The staffer said that the GOP’s majority staff had spent 1,400 hours reviewing the ICA and its source reports – mostly in a secure room at CIA headquarters – and had spent another 300 hours on outside research. The staffer said the GOP’s majority staff had also conducted “twenty interviews of intelligence officers or FBI agents who were associated with drafting the ICA or the production of raw reporting cited sources.”

Controversy over Putin’s strategic intent in 2016

The Senate Intelligence Committee released a bipartisan report in 2020 defending the 2016 ICA. The panel said congressional investigators found no evidence of political pressure and determined the assessment “presents a coherent and well-constructed intelligence basis for the case of unprecedented Russian interference.” The senators also found that “the differing confidence levels on one analytic judgment are justified and properly represented.”

The Senate findings clashed with a 2018 report from the Nunes-led HPSCI, which concluded that “the majority of the Intelligence Community Assessment judgments on Russia’s election activities employed proper analytic tradecraft” but the “judgments on Putin’s strategic intentions did not.” The House report said it “identified significant intelligence tradecraft failings that undermine confidence in the ICA judgments regarding Putin’s strategic objectives.” That report was not bipartisan – and many of its findings remain classified.

The new CIA review on Wednesday offered some critiques of one of the ICA’s “high confidence” assessments on Putin’s motivations in the 2016 election, concluding that “the ‘aspired’ judgment did not merit the ‘high confidence’ level that CIA and FBI attached to it.”

The January 2017 assessment from the CIA, the FBI, and the National Security Agency (NSA) concluded with “high confidence” that Putin “ordered an influence campaign in 2016” and that Russia worked to “undermine public faith in the U.S. democratic process, denigrate Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency” and “developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump.”

Admiral Mike Rogers, then the leader of the NSA, diverged from Brennan and Comey on one key aspect, expressing only “moderate confidence” rather than “high confidence” that Putin had “aspired to help” Trump’s election chances in 2016 by “discrediting” Clinton “and publicly contrasting her unfavorably to him.”

The new CIA review stated that “NSA and a few other participants were not comfortable with ascribing ‘high confidence’ to the ‘aspired’ judgment. They cited the limited source base, lack of corroborating intelligence, and ‘the possibility for an alternative judgment’ as driving their discomfort.”

The lessons learned review found that, in one instance, the authors of the 2016 ICA “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 CIA’s new review “does not dispute the quality and credibility of the highly classified CIA serialized report that the ICA authors relied on to drive the ‘aspired’ judgment.  … However, given the centrality of this singular report to the ‘aspired’ judgment, the authors probably should have more clearly addressed the uncertainty with how the cited information on Putin’s intentions was acquired.”

The lessons learned review also stated that, in December 2016, “the two senior leaders of the CIA mission center responsible for Russia argued jointly against including the ‘aspire’ judgment” and that they sent a late December 2016 email to Brennan where “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” and warned that including it would only “open up a line of very politicized inquiry.”

Brennan, Comey, Rogers, and then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper briefed President-elect Trump about their election meddling findings at Trump Tower in January 2017. Comey stayed behind to tell Trump about some of the dossier’s more salacious allegations.

Steele Dossier makes its way into the ICA

Comey and discredited FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe had pushed in December 2016 to include Steele's debunked dossier in the body of the 2016 ICA on alleged Russian meddling, but they were largely thwarted by the NSA and others – yet the dossier was still included in an annex to the assessment.

The CIA’s new review found that “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” and that the CIA’s then-deputy director for analysis warned in a late December 2020 email to Brennan that including the dossier in any form risked “the credibility of the entire paper.”

“Despite these objections, Brennan showed a preference for narrative consistency over analytical soundness. 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 CIA said in its new review, with the declassified lessons learned document stating that Brennan had written that “my bottomline is that I believe that the information warrants inclusion in the report.”

The CIA said in its new review: “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 unsubstantiated claims to the status of credible supporting evidence, compromising the analytical integrity of the judgment.”

Concerns go beyond just 2016, including Havana Syndrome & COVID origins

Crawford connected the controversy over the CIA’s lessons learned memo to broader concerns he has about the politicization of intelligence.

He stressed to Trump that “our analytic tradecraft concerns are not limited to a single aspect of the 2016 ICA, and include matters under current investigation by HPSCI such as CIA's work on Anomalous Health Incidents and COVID.”

The mystery behind so-called “Havana Syndrome” – officially termed anomalous health incidents (AHIs) – remains ongoing, and a number of Republicans have increasingly begun to argue that the U.S. intelligence community has been improperly downplaying the possibility that a foreign adversary is behind the symptoms that have allegedly afflicted some American spies and diplomats.

The House Intelligence CIA Subcommittee – then led by Crawford – released an unclassified interim report in December last year arguing that a foreign foe might be behind AHIs and that leaders of U.S. spy agencies had wrongly dismissed this hypothesis.

“It is increasingly likely a foreign adversary is responsible for some portion of reported AHIs,” Crawford’s December report argued. “The Committee has direct evidence the Intelligence Community Assessment on AHIs was developed in a manner inconsistent with analytic integrity and thoroughness. The assessment is sufficiently problematic as to hinder the Subcommittee’s trust in the Intelligence Community’s process and conclusions.”

Crawford’s subcommittee contended that “the Intelligence Community tried to impede the CIA Subcommittee’s investigation at every turn” and that “the conclusions published by the DNI in the unclassified Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) on AHI are dubious at best and misleading at worst.”

Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee in late 2022 also released a report criticizing the intelligence community over its handling of the investigation into the origins of COVID-19.

The HPSCI Republicans concluded at the time that “the U.S. Intelligence Community has unique capabilities in obtaining relevant information and in determining the origins of COVID-19” but that “its efforts to date have fallen short, both in its own assessments and in what it has been willing to share” with both Congress and the American public.

“Based on our investigation involving a variety of public and non-public information, we conclude that there are indications that SARS-CoV-2 may have been tied to China’s biological weapons research program and spilled over to the human population during a lab-related incident at the Wuhan Institute of Virology,” Republicans on HPSCI assessed in a December 2022 report. “The IC has failed to adequately address this information.”

The HPSCI Republicans also said in 2022 that there was “reason to believe that the IC downplayed the possibility that SARS-CoV-2 was connected to China’s bioweapons program.”