by WorldTribune Staff, July 22, 2025 Real World News
Records show that intelligence officials who found there was “no intelligence” to support claims that Russia interfered in the 2016 election to benefit then-GOP candidate Donald Trump were overruled by then-CIA Director John Brennan, a report said.
“The records are related to ongoing criminal investigations into Brennan and other top intelligence officials for their roles in launching the Russia collusion hoax,” Mollie Hemingway reported for The Federalist on Tuesday.
The dispute was over the “key judgment” in a January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) that Russia had interfered in the election specifically because Putin and the Russian government “aspired to help President-elect Trump’s election chances.”
“We have no intelligence to directly support this ‘aspiration’ point,” said one member of the small group of individuals working with Brennan, FBI Director James Comey, and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper on the assessment of Russian activity in the lead-up to the 2016 election.
The records show one official asking in December 2016: “Can you really prove Moscow was trying to get Trump elected?”
On Dec. 30, 2016, Brennan called the dissenting individuals into his office and had a lengthy meeting in which they articulated their serious concerns about the veracity of the Trump-Russia claims.
The assessment of Russian collusion on Trump’s behalf “will stay the same,” Brennan reported at the end of the meeting.
Hemingway noted:
The paper trail about this dispute posed a problem for Brennan, who had presented the information as being universally held with a high degree of confidence. The CIA review noted that the key judgment was given a “higher confidence level than was justified.” It further noted the ICA had been drafted under an unusually rushed timeline, had been preceded by leaks to The Washington Post and New York Times improperly claiming “definitive conclusions” had already been reached, and had indications of a “potential political motive.”
Brennan later threw the dissenting officials under the bus when he recounted the events. Explaining his decision to ignore the concerns of the career intelligence experts, he said, “I came to the conclusion that the two officers had not read all the available intelligence,” Brennan wrote in his 2020 book Undaunted, of his decision to keep the key judgment despite the concerns.
To this day, Brennan has never publicly shared what secret knowledge he had that led him to make the claim that Russia sought to help Trump.
Report: Brennan overruled CIA dissent on Russian role in 2016 election added by Editor Two on
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