The Origins of the Russiagate "ICA"

The first important incident (or one of the first) in the metastasis of Clinton campaign “dirty tricks” into institutional resistance to the incoming Trump administration was the commissioning of the Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA), which sabotaged incoming Trump administration.¹

The commissioning of the ICA - and its use in destabilizing the new administration - was neatly choreographed by the outgoing Obama administration, the CIA and Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) – so neatly choreographed that the coordination has almost entirely escaped public notice, with nearly all the relevant documents remaining shrouded in secrecy.

ICA series: Part 2; Part 3; Part 4

With the passage of time, it is difficult to fully recall that, early on, before the ICA, there was still agnosticism and even skepticism that Russia interfered in US election in order to elect Trump. Before the ICA, if any one individual was then blamed by Democrats for Clinton’s loss, it would have been James Comey, rather than Vladimir Putin². It was an innocent time when Comey’s announcement of the re-opening of the Clinton email investigation in late October was viewed as more important to the election outcome than Buff Bernie Facebook ads.

As of December 2016, the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane investigation had turned up nothing³. And despite all the “lock her up” rhetoric of the campaign, in his acceptance speech, Trump declared that he had moved on from such recriminations and would let bygones be bygones.  

However, the ICA re-animated the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane investigation, which, as manipulated by Comey, mutated into the Mueller inquisition. Equally important, the ICA allegations were institutionalized by the Senate SCI through the announcement of its own “bipartisan” investigation into the Russiagate allegations concurrent with the release of the ICA in January 2017.

The ICA’s effectiveness in destabilizing the new administration came from two widely publicized “findings”:

• That Russia agencies, under personal direction from Putin, had interfered in election on multiple fronts, not with a generalized intent of countering aggressive international interference by US-backed NGOs by exposing hypocrisy in US democracy, but with the specific intent of electing Trump. This claim led to the sensational portrayals of Trump as a sort of Manchurian candidate that undermined the incoming administration throughout its tenure;

• Its endorsement of the credibility of Steele and his “network”, together with the immediate leak to media that Steele dossier allegations had been included in the classified ICA and personally briefed to President-elect Trump.

Although the public ICA was very skimpy on facts and evidence (to say the least), it was wildly successful in creating suspicion about the incoming administration and institutionalizing an atmosphere in which there was a realistic prospect of a coalition of Democrats and McCain neocon Republicans could undo the 2016 election through impeachment – insurrection through lawfare, so to speak.  The SSCI investigation hung over the Trump administration even longer than the Mueller investigation, as the final results of this investigation were not published until August 2020 – just in time for the 2020 election campaign.  As with other key documents, the SSCI Report was heavily redacted. In particular, the sections containing the purported evidence for the most important ICA claims being more or less totally redacted.

In this article, I will re-visit available information on the origin and execution of the ICA,

The November 7, 2016 Assessments: Pre-ICA

On the eve of the election, on November 7, 2016, both the ODNI and FBI issued still secret assessments, but neither appears to have contained any hint of the subsequent ICA paranoia.

A November 7, 2016 ODNI intelligence assessment was cited in an exchange with former DNI Clapper testifying to the House Intel Committee several months later. Rep. Wenstrup and former DNI Clapper agreed that his November 7 assessment did not have the “level of concern and priority that we saw after the election”:

Rep. Wenstrup then asked Clapper whether this was “due to new evidence”. Clapper answered affirmatively, but all details of his answer, presumably with information on this “new evidence”, were redacted.

Wenstrup appears to have continued this line of questioning, but the subsequent exchanges were totally redacted.

The FBI also issued an assessment⁴ of election-related cyber activity on November 7, 2016. This assessment was referred to in a November 29, 2016 letter from Democrat senators on the SSCI, a redacted version of which was provided to Jason Leopold of Buzzfeed in November 2018, but, once again, the relevant portion was redacted and remains redacted. Despite the lack of detail, it is evident that the November 7, 2016 FBI assessment similarly did not contain the key ICA allegation of Russian interest and objective in electing Trump.

November 29, 2016 CIA Briefs SSCI

The first overt step in the ICA operation came on (or about) November 29, 2016 when the CIA gave a briefing to the Senate Intel Committee (SSCI). While documents on this briefing remain classified and/or totally redacted, based on subsequent events, this CIA briefing appears to be the first avatar of the incendiary claim (soon to be made public) that the CIA now assessed that Russia was trying to elect Trump.

On November 30, 2016, the day after the meeting, Democrat senators on the Senate Intel Committee issued the following announcement⁵ (immediately reported at Politico):

We believe there is additional information concerning the Russian Government and the U.S. election that should be declassified and released to the public.  We are conveying specifics through classified channels.

The Democrat senators concurrently sent a letter to the Obama White House (excerpts of which are in the almost totally redacted FOIA release[1] to Buzzfeed in November 2018 cited above) that expressed “serious concerns about information recently provided to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence regarding Russian Active Measures and election related cyber activity associated with the Russian intelligence services”. They requested “declassification and release of the information”:

This (seminal) November 29, 2016 SSCI briefing was not discussed or even mentioned in the five-volume SSCI report on Russiagate published in 2020.

However, details of the highly confidential briefing were promptly leaked to Washington Post reporters Entous, Nakashima and Miller⁶ who, on December 9, 2016, published the then novel assertion that the “assessment of the intelligence community that Russia’s goal here was to favor one candidate over the other, to help Trump get elected”:

The CIA has concluded in a secret assessment that Russia intervened in the 2016 election to help Donald Trump win the presidency, rather than just to undermine confidence in the U.S. electoral system, according to officials briefed on the matter.

“It is the assessment of the intelligence community that Russia’s goal here was to favor one candidate over the other, to help Trump get elected,” said a senior U.S. official briefed on an intelligence presentation made to U.S. senators. “That’s the consensus view.”

The CIA shared its latest assessment with key senators in a closed-door briefing on Capitol Hill last week, in which agency officials cited a growing body of intelligence from multiple sources. Agency briefers told the senators it was now “quite clear” that electing Trump was Russia’s goal, according to the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence matters. 

Putting two and two together, it is now obvious why the SSCI Democrats were so anxious that the CIA assessment be made public and why the Obama administration was so anxious to “create a record the next administration couldn’t erase”⁷.

See here for Part 2 (forthcoming).

Commissioning of the ICA

A few days after the November 30, 2016 letter from the SSCI Democrats (“in early December”), Obama Chief of Staff Denis McDonough called Brennan and said that Obama wanted a “complete written record” on Russiagate before the end of his term, described by Brennan as follows⁸

Denis McDonough called me on the secure line in early December and said that President Obama wanted ‘a report produced on everything the Russians had done to interfere in the election. “The president wants ‘a complete written record on what happened, John, but can it be done” he asked, “without compromising sensitive sources and methods?”

Brennan endorsed the idea and suggested that the request be made to Clapper with the proviso that, “if the president …wants to protect sources and methods”, intel agencies other than CIA, ODNI, FBI and NSA should be excluded from the assessment (contrary to standard practice):

I told Denis that pulling together a written record was an excellent idea and that the president should ask Jim Clapper to ‘oversee the production of an intelligence assessment. I added one caveat.

“CIA can take the lead drafting the report,” I told Denis, “But if the president wants a full record of what happened and still protect sources and methods, we ‘will need to restrict the coordination process to ODNI, CIA, FBI, and NSA.

McDonough agreed.

Brennan then called Clapper to give him a “heads up”: Undaunted. They agreed that CIA should be lead and that there should be two versions: a top secret document and an unclassified version with the same conclusions. This aspect of the plan hasn’t attracted much commentary but it was integral: by issuing a public version of the ICA, the stain against the incoming administration would be impossible to remove.

Then, on December 6, 2016, at a meeting of the National Security Council, Obama instructed Clapper to prepare an Intel Community Assessment on Russian interference, requiring a delivery date a few weeks later – prior to the inauguration of the incoming administration.

Surprisingly, according to the SSCI Report four years later, “there was no document memorializing this presidential direction”:

According to Greg Miller⁹, Obama wanted to create a “record the next administration couldn’t erase”. At the same time, Obama seems to have taken care to ensure that there were no record of the presidential direction that created the “record the next administration couldn’t erase”.

Later on December 6, 2016, Clapper “passed the President’s verbal direction” to the National Intelligence Council, assigning Julia Gurganus, NIO Russia (who had briefed the House Intelligence Committee the previous day) and Vinh Nguyen, NIO Cyber Issues: SSCI Volume 5. FBI assignees were Bill Priestap and Jon Moffa.

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Announcement of the ICA

The commissioning of the Russiagate ICA was announced at a breakfast on the morning of December 9, 2016 by Lisa Monaco. It had been commissioned on December 6, 2016 - see link.

The announcement was promptly reported in US media: WaPo, NYT, CNN, Politico.¹⁰

Press liaisons throughout the intel community were equipped with talking points that are documented in ODNI emails¹¹. Among the recipients were Ned Price EOP/NSC, Mark Stroh EOP/NSC, John Kirby (State), Mark Toner (State), Elizabeth Trudeau (State), Marc Raimondi (EOP/NSC), Timothy Barrett, Michael Birmingham.

In a follow-up story, Nakashima and Entous reported¹² that the initiative arose due to a supposed “clamor from Democrats and some Republicans”:

The clamor from Democrats and some Republicans for a more fulsome accounting prompted the White House on Friday [December 9, 2016] to announce that President Obama had ordered a full review of Russian cyber actions during the 2016 campaign. 

In context, the so-called “clamor” was almost certainly the November 30, 2016 request by SSCI Democrats for public disclosure of the contents of the November 29, 2016 SSCI briefing by CIA about the new “information” that Putin preferred Trump. The result was the commissioning of a CIA-led assessment that would leave a “permanent” and public stain on the incoming Trump administration.

First Public Disclosure

The first public disclosure of the CIA assessment that “the CIA has concluded in a secret assessment that Russia intervened in the 2016 election to help Donald Trump win the presidency, rather than just to undermine confidence in the U.S. electoral system” came later on December 9, 2016 evening in a major Washington Post article by Entous, Nakashima and Miller (see link). This was one of the two or three most important stories in the entire Russiagate corpus.

Using the same URL¹³ as their morning story on the ICA announcement, their entirely new evening article [1]  reported that “the CIA has concluded in a secret assessment that Russia intervened in the 2016 election to help Donald Trump win the presidency, rather than just to undermine confidence in the U.S. electoral system”.  This was also the first (or one of the first) articles in which (questionable) Russiagate narratives were promoted by leaking “officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity”.

This leaked “information” would subsequently become the most publicized finding in the ICA and its impact lingers to this day.

The Washington Post article also strongly indicates that the mystery information in the November 29, 2016 CIA briefing (and presumably the redactions in Clapper testimony) was the assessment that “Russia intervened in the 2016 election to help Trump win” and not just to “undermine confidence”.  

With the leak being made public, the White House-CIA-SSCI choreography was more or less complete. 

Another important claim in the Washington Post article has disappeared from view, but attracted attention at the time: they stated that intel agencies had “identified individuals with connections to the Russian government who provided WikiLeaks” with the DNC emails; that the individuals were said to be “actors known to the intelligence community” and “‘one step’ removed from the Russian government, rather than government employees”; and that the intel agencies did not have “specific intelligence showing officials in the Kremlin ‘directing’” the transfer to Wikileaks:

Intelligence agencies have identified individuals with connections to the Russian government who provided WikiLeaks with thousands of hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee and others, including Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, according to U.S. officials. Those officials described the individuals as actors known to the intelligence community and part of a wider Russian operation to boost Trump and hurt Clinton’s chances….

…

A senior U.S. official said there were minor disagreements among intelligence officials about the agency’s assessment, in part because some questions remain unanswered. For example, intelligence agencies do not have specific intelligence showing officials in the Kremlin “directing” the identified individuals to pass the Democratic emails to WikiLeaks, a second senior U.S. official said. Those actors, according to the official, were “one step” removed from the Russian government, rather than government employees. Moscow has in the past used middlemen to participate in sensitive intelligence operations so it has plausible deniability.

Within a few weeks, intelligence agencies purported to identify GRU as the agency responsible for passing DNC emails to Wikileaks and to have specific intelligence that the operation was not only directed by “officials in the Kremlin”, but specifically authorized by Putin himself. In substantial contradiction to the December 9, 2016 nattarive.

New York Times

In the evening of December 9, 2016, like the Washington Post, the New York Times substituted an entirely new article at the URL used for its commonplace morning announcement of the ICA.¹⁴

They reported that a key element in the intel agency assessment that Russia was promoting Trump’s candidacy was their assessment that Russia had also hacked the RNC computer system, but hadn’t released information from that hack. However, the RNC denied that the RNC had been similarly hacked.

American intelligence agencies have concluded with “high confidence” that Russia acted covertly in the latter stages of the presidential campaign to harm Hillary Clinton’s chances and promote Donald J. Trump, according to senior administration officials.

They based that conclusion, in part, on another finding — which they say was also reached with high confidence — that the Russians hacked the Republican National Committee’s computer systems in addition to their attacks on Democratic organizations, but did not release whatever information they gleaned from the Republican networks.

Seven years later, we still don’t know the basis for the damaging intel assessment that Russia supposedly preferred Trump: is it possible that the assessment depended on something as flimsy as the non-hacking or non-release of RNC emails?

Contemporary Commentary

Glenn Greenwald, then at The Intercept link, acidly observed that nothing in the WaPo or NYT articles constituted evidence.

There is still no such evidence for any of these claims. What we have instead are assertions, disseminated by anonymous people, completely unaccompanied by any evidence, let alone proof. As a result, none of the purported evidence — still — can be publicly seen, reviewed, or discussed. Anonymous claims leaked to newspapers about what the CIA believes do not constitute proof, and certainly do not constitute reliable evidence that substitutes for actual evidence that can be reviewed. Have we really not learned this lesson yet?

Greenwald’s criticism remained valid even after the ICA was published, as it too consisted of assertions and did not provide supporting evidence for its key claim that Russia

Marcy Wheeler link, who was closely following these events in real time, commented immediately that the leaked story, which she attributed to CIA and/or Democrat Senators [on the SSCI], was “designed to make the White House-order review more urgent and influence the outcome”:

This story was leaked within hours of the time the White House announced it was calling for an all-intelligence community review of the Russia intelligence, offered without much detail. Indeed, this story was leaked and published as an update to that story.

Which is to say, the CIA and/or people in Congress (this story seems primarily to come from Democratic Senators) leaked this, apparently in response to President Obama’s not terribly urgent call to have all intelligence agencies weigh in on the subject of Russian influence, after weeks of Democrats pressuring him to release more information. It was designed to both make the White House-ordered review more urgent and influence the outcome.

Wheeler immediately drew attention to the reporting that there were (supposedly) “minor disagreements” within the agencies, acidly pointing out the previous bad history of such disagreements being papered over in the Iraqi WMD assessment. She noted that the assessed linkage depended critically on showing that the documents received by Wikileaks originated from the hack attributed to GRU (rather than a parallel leak or hack from the poorly secured DNC server):

Another senior US official (or maybe the very same one) says there are “minor disagreements.”

Remember: we went to war against Iraq, which turned out to have no WMD, in part because no one read the “minor disagreements” from a few agencies about some aluminum tubes. A number of Senators who didn’t read that footnote closely (and at least one that did) are involved in this story. What we’re being told is there are some aluminum tube type disagreements.

Let’s hear about those disagreements this time, shall we?

This is the part that has always been missing in the past: how the documents got from GRU, which hacked the DNC and John Podesta, to Wikileaks, which released them. It appears that CIA now thinks they know the answer: some people one step removed from the Russian government, funneling the documents from GRU hackers (presumably) to Wikileaks to be leaked, with the intent of electing Trump.

Seven years later, Wheeler’s original questions remain unresolved. They were unresolved in the ICA. And the relevant section in the 2020 SSCI Report was entirely redacted. Further, the description of the persons who had supposedly been identified by the CIA as having transferred emails to Wikileaks (“‘one step’ removed from the Russian government, rather than government employees”) was inconsistent with the Mueller indictment of two GRU employees alleged to have been responsible for transferring the emails under the Guccifer.

Matlock’s Commentary on the ICA

Perhaps the most insightful commentary on the peculiar terms of reference and structure of the Brennan ICA came in July 2018 from Reagan era Ambassador to Soviet Union Jack Matlock¹⁵ (who had been at the table with Reagan and Gorbachev at the end of the Cold War). Matlock observed that the structure of the ICA did not comply with intelligence community standards and that the Brennan-Clapper procedure replicated the procedural mistakes of the catastrophically poor WMD assessment in 2003:

This report is labeled “Intelligence Community Assessment,” but in fact it is not that. A report of the intelligence community in my day would include the input of all the relevant intelligence agencies and would reveal whether all agreed with the conclusions. Individual agencies did not hesitate to “take a footnote” or explain their position if they disagreed with a particular assessment. A report would not claim to be that of the “intelligence community” if any relevant agency was omitted.

The report states that it represents the findings of three intelligence agencies: CIA, FBI, and NSA, but even that is misleading in that it implies that there was a consensus of relevant analysts in these three agencies. In fact, the report was prepared by a group of analysts from the three agencies pre-selected by their directors, with the selection process generally overseen by James Clapper, then Director of National Intelligence (DNI). Clapper told the Senate in testimony May 8, 2017, that it was prepared by “two dozen or so analysts—hand-picked, seasoned experts from each of the contributing agencies.” If you can hand-pick the analysts, you can hand-pick the conclusions. The analysts selected would have understood what Director Clapper wanted since he made no secret of his views. Why would they endanger their careers by not delivering?

What should have struck any congressperson or reporter was that the procedure Clapper followed was the same as that used in 2003 to produce the report falsely claiming that Saddam Hussein had retained stocks of weapons of mass destruction. That should be worrisome enough to inspire questions, but that is not the only anomaly.

Matlock additionally observed the absence of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research, even though the most important conclusions of the ICA related to the Russian GRU (on which DIA was the leading authority) and Russian political activity and intentions (on which State Department INR was the leading authority):

During my time in government, a judgment regarding national security would include reports from, as a minimum, the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), and the Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) of the State Department. The FBI was rarely, if ever, included unless the principal question concerned law enforcement within the United States. NSA might have provided some of the intelligence used by the other agencies but normally did not express an opinion regarding the substance of reports.

What did I notice when I read the January report? There was no mention of INR or DIA! The exclusion of DIA might be understandable since its mandate deals primarily with military forces, except that the report attributes some of the Russian activity to the GRU, Russian military intelligence. DIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, is the U.S. intelligence organ most expert on the GRU. Did it concur with this attribution? The report doesn’t say.

The omission of INR is more glaring since a report on foreign political activity could not have been that of the U.S. intelligence community without its participation. After all, when it comes to assessments of foreign intentions and foreign political activity, the State Department’s intelligence service is by far the most knowledgeable and competent. In my day, it reported accurately on Gorbachev’s reforms when the CIA leaders were advising that Gorbachev had the same aims as his predecessors.

Matlock then criticized the media and politicians for their collective failure to ask even the most elementary due diligence questions on the ICA:

This is where due diligence comes in. The first question responsible journalists and politicians should have asked is “Why is INR not represented? Does it have a different opinion? If so, what is that opinion? Most likely the official answer would have been that this is “classified information.” But why should it be classified? If some agency heads come to a conclusion and choose (or are directed) to announce it publicly, doesn’t the public deserve to know that one of the key agencies has a different opinion?

The second question should have been directed at the CIA, NSA, and FBI: did all their analysts agree with these conclusions or were they divided in their conclusions? What was the reason behind hand-picking analysts and departing from the customary practice of enlisting analysts already in place and already responsible for following the issues involved?

Six years later, these questions remain unanswered. Or, more accurately, still unasked.

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1. This post was re-written on March 11, 2024, incorporating several articles.

2. This might subconsciously have given Comey, still a Beltway resident uncomfortable with being blamed for the loss, an incentive to transfer blame to someone else.

3. The Carter Page FISA, quite separate from whether it was questionable or not, clearly did not yield any damning information (or we’d have heard about it). Two FBI informants (Confidential Human Sources “CHS”) has been sent against Papadopoulos, also yielding nothing. The idea that Flynn, a decorated veteran who had displayed personal heroism, was a traitor was implausible to begin with. Nothing had turned up to change that view Manafort, who was not part of Trump’s inner circle, had a long involvement in Ukraine (not Russia) prior to his involvement with the Trump campaign.

4. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/jasonleopold/heres-the-classified-letter-about-russia-senate-democrats   in response to a Jason Leopold (Buzzfeed) FOIA request. referred to in a November 29 letter from Democrat senators on the SSCI (see discussion below), a redacted version of which was provided to Jason Leopold of Buzzfeed in November 2018.

5. https://www.wyden.senate.gov/news/press-releases/wyden-leads-7-senate-intelligence-committee-members-calling-on-the-president-to-declassify-information-re-russia-and-the-us-election. The announcement was covered at Politico . The SSCI Democrats had stated that “information recently provided” (in the CIA briefing) “has not been provided to the American people” “despite broad national interest” and requested the declassification and release of a list of information.

6. http://archive.is/WHMke; https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/obama-orders-review-of-russian-hacking-during-presidential-campaign/2016/12/09/31d6b300-be2a-11e6-94ac-3d324840106c_story.html  Dec 9, 2016 12:15 PM.  Thus, the Entous et al article, based on leaks, provides the only public information on what, in retrospect, was a seminal meeting. 

7. xxxx

8. Undaunted, xx

9. Miller, 213

10. E.g. CNN https://www.cnn.com/2016/12/09/politics/obama-orders-review-into-russian-hacking-of-2016-election/index.html; Politico http://www.politico.com/story/2016/12/obama-orders-full-review-of-election-relate-hacking-232419; NYT http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/09/us/obama-russia-election-hack.html; WaPo https://web.archive.org/web/20161209181118/https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/obama-orders-review-of-russian-hacking-during-presidential-campaign/2016/12/09/31d6b300-be2a-11e6-94ac-3d324840106c_story.html; https://archive.is/SzPNS 

11. Jason Leopold, Buzzfeed, FOIA, Nov 9, 2018. https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/5031716/LEOPOLD-SHAPIRO-ODNI-FOIA-RUSSIA-HACKING.pdf

12. Entous and Nakashima, Dec 10, 2016.. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/fbi-and-cia-give-differing-accounts-to-lawmakers-on-russias-motives-in-2016-hacks/2016/12/10/c6dfadfa-bef0-11e6-94ac-3d324840106c_story.html

13. The replacement of one story with the other is documented in successive versions at archive.org:  https://web.archive.org/web/20161211005730/https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/obama-orders-review-of-russian-hacking-during-presidential-campaign/2016/12/09/31d6b300-be2a-11e6-94ac-3d324840106c_story.html; https://archive.is/qRbm8

14. http://newsdiffs.org/diff/1314767/1314800/www.nytimes.com/2016/12/09/us/obama-russia-election-hack.html; https://archive.is/hSeD8

15. https://consortiumnews.com/2018/07/03/former-us-envoy-to-moscow-calls-intelligence-report-on-alleged-russian-interference-politically-motivated/