A recently declassified report from the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence has shed light on the origins of the 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA), which claimed that Russian President Vladimir Putin favored Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. The document, made public by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, says former CIA Director John Brennan pushed for the inclusion of potentially unreliable and biased reports to support this narrative, despite warnings from intelligence officials about the lack of solid evidence.
Then-President Barack Obama gave the order to release the information.
According to the document:
Acting on President Obama’s orders, DCIA Brennan directed a “full review” and publication of raw HUMINT information that had been collected before the election. CIA officers said that some of this information had been held on orders of the DCIA, while other reporting had been judged by experienced CIA officers to have not met longstanding publication standards. Some of the latter was unclear or from unknown subsources, but would nonetheless be published after the election – on orders of DCIA and cited in the ICA to support claims that Putin aspired to help Trump win.