Back to basics for new CIA: Dossier ‘did not meet even the most basic tradecraft standards’

by WorldTribune Staff, March 15, 2026 Real World News

Many once believed the CIA and FBI were intelligence agencies “par excellence,” dedicated to truth, justice and the American way as the Superman slogan put it.

However, a review by new CIA Director John Ratcliffe revealed what many knew: Democrat Party political agendas often took precedence over it mission statement of “advancing national security.”

Agency leaks to legacy media continue, but now the agency has been credited with playing a key role leading up to the Iran War.

Intelligence agencies under President Barack Obama “did not meet even the most basic tradecraft standards” in their assessment that Russia had interfered in the 2016 election to help President Donald Trump, the review of Russiagate found.

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 2025.

The review states that the Obama spy agencies’ assessment of so-called Trump-Russia collusion 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.”

The CIA’s review said that 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.

“This was Obama, Comey, Clapper and Brennan deciding ‘We’re going to screw Trump,’ ” Ratcliffe told the New York Post’s Miranda Devine.

“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.”

On Dec. 6, 2016, six weeks before his presidency ended, Obama ordered the intelligence 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 intelligence community assessment (ICA), including “a highly compressed production timeline, stringent compartmentation, and excessive involvement of agency heads.”

The review “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 New York Post’s Miranda Devine noted.

The review states: “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.”

Brennan directed the compilation of the assessment, and 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,” the CIA’s review said.

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,” Devine noted.

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.

Three days after Obama ordered the assessment, on Dec. 9, 2016, both the Washington Post and New York Times reported the Obama intelligence community had “concluded with high confidence that Russia had intervened specifically to help Trump win the election.”

The Washington Post and New York Times were awarded Pulitzer Prize for their bogus reporting on Russiagate. Both have refused to give up the prizes.

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