CIA Tradecraft Analysis Showed Intelligence Fraud About Trump and Russia

Welcome back to Game Theory Today. I’m Eric Garland. YouTube is telling me that many of my viewers are watching because they are looking up videos about intelligence analysis, tradecraftraft, and how to work as an intelligence analyst in the field. That is very dorky and I like it a lot. If that is why you’re watching, you’re in luck today because this video is about analytic tradecraft, integrity, and professional standards. And while nerdy, those are important because those standards were allegedly violated so badly that it may rise to the level of criminal charges. Grand juries are open against CIA director John Brennan at the very least for his apparent obvious lie under oath that the CIA had nothing to do with the steel dossier, didn’t include it in any major reports when in fact it had.

The DOJ is reportedly investigating a grand conspiracy to create false intelligence connecting Trump and Putin. And the Steel Dossier was at the center of that. , 5 secondsNow, if you follow my work, you know I’ve been on this topic for around 9 years, and I single-handedly brought Russia’s attacks to the public’s , 13 secondsattention on Twitter in December 2016 after Trump won with my game theory thread. But I was careful about what I , 21 secondssaid, that Russia was attacking democracy and that foreign and domestic agents were all over America, concluding , 29 secondsthat the Trump years were about to be very rough. And I stand by all of that as all of that came to pass. But now we , 37 secondshave increasing evidence that certain leaders of the intelligence community had a dilitterious effect on our national discussion about that attack.

, 46 secondsThe CIA entered the discussion about America’s 2016 election and through media leaks and the creation of certain , 54 secondsreports to the public gave Americans a false impression of the newly elected president’s relationship to the Russian , 1 secondFederation. The CIA itself has now conducted a tradecraftraft review of how a controversial report on Trump and Russia was produced. And it looks , 9 secondsincreasingly clear that a few agency heads betrayed the analytic standards of their agencies in order to affect American political debate. , 19 secondsIt’s looking like it comes down to John Brennan versus the CIA. Let’s go. , 26 secondsReading the CIA tradecraft review, I’ve identified about 10 ways that John Brennan appears to have singlehandedly , 33 secondsoverridden the practices of the CIA and the rest of the intelligence community.

, 38 secondsIt’s not that the CIA attacked America’s 2016 election as a whole. It’s that , 45 secondsformer CIA director John Brennan and former Director of National Intelligence General Jim Clapper used the CIA to achieve the goal of harming President Trump based on fraudulent intelligence. , 57 secondsWe’re going to go over the 2016 intelligence community assessment in the same spirit that this channel revisited the Iraq war intelligence, which is by , 7 secondssome of the same people behind the Iraq war intelligence and which leads sadly to the same set of conclusions about , 16 secondstheir analytical rigor and what their intentions were. It’s not very good. I have a bit of personal animus here.

, 23 secondsWithout the late 2016 intelligence community assessment and the testimony in public from agency heads, guys like , 31 secondsme working in the open source would never have reached the same conclusions about Trump and Russia that we did. I , 38 secondshad one set when I was writing my game theory thread December 11th, 2016. And when those guys came out in public and , 45 secondssaid we have high confidence, that changed the way guys like me thought about it. So, I want this , 53 secondsunpacked all the way. You know, it’s like when we heard that Trump adviser Carter Page had a FISA warrant on him , 1 secondfor his work in Russia during the campaign. This guy Carter Page was going to Russia and to get a FISA warrant , 8 secondsthrown on you by the by the DOJ and by the intelligence community that says that you’re working for another government.

You’re certainly not one of , 16 secondsours and we want to know exactly what you’re up to. Well, guys like me, when we heard about that FISA, we assumed there must be something to it. When you , 26 secondsgo to apply to the Fisk, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which was, I believe, overseen by Judge Boazberg, whose name pops up a lot these , 34 secondsdays, we assumed it had to be something other than just that stupid steel dossier everyone was gossiping about. , 41 secondsBut no, it appears now that that’s all there was to get a very important FISA , 48 secondswarrant on this guy. And when the CIA came out and said that it had high confidence in Putin preferring Trump, it , 56 secondscouldn’t just be that this stupid steel dossier was behind that assessment.

, 2 secondsBy definition of what high confidence means, it had to be more than that. , 8 secondsBut now we have a declassified CIA note about the trade craft behind the 2016 ICA and the Central Intelligence Agency , 17 secondsis now saying that there were significant departures from its normal practices at the behest of former , 24 secondsdirector Brennan and the Steel Dossier was playing a starring role yet again. , 31 secondsSo, in this video, I’m going to take you through the offending 2016 ICA, which I’m sure none of you have read, and the , 39 secondsCIA’s June 2025 Trade Craft review. If you’ve ever had an opinion about Trump andor Russia, this nerdy stuff is worth , 47 secondsyour time because the spies in question got involved in our national discussion.

, 52 secondsThey got involved in at least one impeachment and then they keep coming out for further discussions about things like Hunter Biden’s laptop being Russian , 1 seconddisinformation. So, we need to examine their conduct as intelligence professionals. And I’m afraid it doesn’t look very good for former director , 9 secondsBrennan or General Clapper. And America may need to resort to criminal prosecution to clean this kind of thing up. , 18 seconds[music] , 25 secondsOkay, let’s get into the nitty-gritty, folks. If we’re going to understand the CIA tradecraftraft review, i.e. what was wrong, we got to look at the document , 32 secondsthat got produced just prior to Trump taking office, and that was the intelligence community assessment , 39 secondsentitled Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US elections.

, 46 secondsThe publication date for this was January 6th, 2017. Just to review super quick, they had an assessment of what , 54 secondsRussia was up to up until about December 8th. On December 9th, 2016, President Obama calls all the spooks together and says, “Clear this stuff up for me. Do a , 3 secondsfinal report.” They decide they’re going to have this thing out before Donald Trump takes office. And around the 10th of January, they present this under oath to the American people. , 14 secondsand their their conclusions were pretty intense that that Trump was preferred by Vladimir Putin and Putin took actions , 23 secondspotentially to make him president. So, let’s look at exactly what they said so we can go back and see what the CIA said about their own performance about it , 30 secondssome years later.

Scope and sourcing information available as of 29 December 2016 was used in the preparation of this product. So, it’s a snapshot in time. , 41 secondsThis report includes an analytic assessment drafted and coordinated among three agencies, the CIA, FBI, and the National Security Agency, the NSA. It , 51 secondsdraws on intelligence information collected and disseminated by those three agencies. It covers the motivation , 58 secondsand scope of Moscow’s intentions regarding US elections and Moscow’s use of cyber tools and media campaigns to , 5 secondsinfluence public opinion. When we use the term we, it refers to an assessment by all three agencies. , 12 secondsUh, this report is a declassified version of a highly classified assessment.

The documents conclusions are identical to the highly classified , 20 secondsassessment, but it doesn’t give the full supporting information. So, they’re saying even if you had an ultra high security clearance, it would say the , 27 secondssame stuff. Uh, they make clear that they do not analyze US political processes. They’re just looking at what the Russians did. and kind of worrisome , 36 secondshere. New information continues to emerge providing increased insight into Russian activities. Uh, okay. , 45 secondsSome of our judgments about Kremlin preferences and intent are drawn from the behavior of Kremlin loyal political , 53 secondsfigures, state media, and pro Kremlin social media actors.

all of whom the Kremlin either directly uses to convey , 1 secondmessages or who are answerable to the Kremlin. Man, that’s pretty complicated. , 6 secondsYou kind of expect them to go, “Hey, we have an audio recording of Vladimir Putin saying, “I don’t like Clinton. I can’t wait until my friend Donald Trump , 15 secondstakes office, but he never does.” And almost immediately we’re hearing about Moscow’s intentions or Vladimir Putin’s , 22 secondsaspirations, but we immediately back off and go, “A lot of this is from Kremlin’s social media actors.” That’s a far cry from the president of the country. , 31 secondsMoving on. Key judgments, and they lead super hard here. We assess Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an , 40 secondsinfluence campaign in 2016 aimed at the US presidential election.

Hm. Russia’s goals were to undermine public faith in , 47 secondsthe US democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, harm her electability, and her potential presidency. Wow, that sounds a lot like , 56 secondsmy game theory thread. I’m excited so far. Keep going. We further assess Putin and the Russian government developed a , 5 secondsclear preference for Presidentelect Trump, and we have high confidence in these judgments. Ooh, that’s different , 13 secondsthan how they were talking a few weeks ago. Let’s see what they got. We also assess Putin and the Russian government , 20 secondsaspired to help President-elect Trump’s election chances when possible by discrediting Clinton and publicly contrasting her unfavorably to him.

, 32 secondsand that further information has come to light since election day that when combined with Russian behavior since , 39 secondsNovember 2016, which is a few weeks ago, this increases our confidence in our assessments of Russian motivations and , 47 secondsgoals. Well, it looks like that evidence was um that information was the Steel Dossier and not much else. But they say , 55 secondsthey assess with high confidence that Russian military was behind Wikileaks, which some of us kind of knew. Okay, that’s that’s pretty important. Let’s , 4 secondssee what they have to back it up. Now, again, they’re saying, “We think Trump was preferred by Putin, and Putin took , 12 secondsactions to help his buddy Donald Trump,” which the entire intelligence community did not say that a few weeks before.

, 17 secondsLet’s see what else they have in there, though. Russia’s influence campaign targeting the 2016 US presidential election. We also assess Putin and the , 25 secondsRussian government aspired to help President-elect Trump’s chances when possible by discrediting Secretary , 32 secondsClinton. Okay. We assess that Putin, his advisers, and the Russian government developed a clear preference for Trump , 40 secondsover Clinton. [clears throat] That Putin publicly indicated a preference for President-elect Trump’s stated policy to , 47 secondswork with Russia. And then pro Kremlin figures spoke highly about what they saw as his right. Well, pro- Kremlin figures , 55 secondsis is different than Putin and the government.

So, a bit of a switcheroo already there in the same sentence that Putin wanted one thing then people who , 4 secondswe assume are like Putin wanted the same thing. Not clear there. Um Putin has had , 11 secondsmany positive experiences working with Sylvio Berlesconian Shrader from Germany. Okay, that really doesn’t have , 19 secondsanything to do with what Putin did in our election though here. Putin, Russian officials, and other prom pundits stopped publicly criticizing the US , 27 secondselection process is unfair almost immediately after the election because Moscow probably assessed it would be counterproductive. , 37 secondsThey kind of they’re backing off some of their their their confidence here.

They don’t have the same tone now, do they? , 44 secondskind of reminds one of the Iraq war, I think, where they’re like, “Saddam Hussein, incredible weapons, amazing weapons.” We assess that he continues to , 52 secondswant weapons. These are different things. Then you have some generalized statements here. Influence effort was the boldest yet in the US elections operation signals new normal in Russian influence efforts. , 5 secondsreviewing the 2016 intelligence community assessment, it’s not as strong as you remember on the spooks coming out , 12 secondsand saying Putin wanted Trump. They actually had vanishingly little , 18 secondsin their assessment that said Putin made specific statements about how he wanted , 25 secondsTrump and not Clinton.

That he was taking these actions about Wikileaks for his friend Trump. that he was doing all , 32 secondsthese things to make sure Trump became president. In fact, it sounded like he didn’t actually have a preference for which candidate won. And in true KGB , 41 secondsfashion, they had a plan for either outcome because their goal is not anything specific. Their goal is just damaging democracy um and America in , 50 secondsparticular. And they have to work with whichever political party wins. So, they hate us all equally. So, now we go back , 57 secondsto the future. June 26th, 2025. Brand new president, guy named Donald Trump, brand new CIA director, John Ratcliffe. , 6 secondsAnd Ratcliffe orders that the deputy director for analysis for the whole CIA do a review of of how that document got , 14 secondsput together and particularly how the CIA took the lead on it.

How did it turn out? Uh, not very good. Turns out much , 21 secondsof how that document was produced, not just its conclusions, but how it was produced was bad. It was just a heap of , 28 secondsproblems and they go into it in great detail which is why we’re looking at this. It’s very very interesting to me. , 34 secondsSo the mo the review focused particular attention on the A’s most debated judgment that Vlad that Russian , 41 secondsPresident Vladimir Putin quote aspired to help then candidate Donald Trump win the election. Drawing on CIA materials , 49 secondsprovided to congressional oversight investigations, the DA diretory of analysis examined whether any procedural anomaly anomalies or tradecraftraft , 57 secondsweaknesses may have affected the soundness and objectivity of this key judgment and the overall assessment.

An assessment of the origins and context to , 6 secondsunderstand the procedural and tradecraftraft issues identified in this review. It is essential to examine the politically charged environment and , 13 secondsunique circumstances that led to the ICA’s development in late 2016. I’ll say we’ve never had an American president , 22 secondsorder that the spooks produce a report that can go to the public about which country might have put a sleeper agent , 29 secondsin the White House. It’s hell of a thing, right? During this period, conflicting public and private statements by intelligence community officials about Russia’s role in the US , 38 secondspresidential election created confusion about the IC’s actual assessment.

These contradictory messages prompted , 46 secondsPresident Obama on December 6th to direct then Director of National Intelligence James Clapper to conduct a comprehensive review of all available , 54 secondsintelligence and provide the IC’s best assessment of Russian activities related to the election. Remember, throughout this process, you have a number of , 3 secondspeople who work for the US government who are going to the media and telling the media stuff about what we assess , 10 secondsfrom a highly classified point of view, what we think these foreign enemies of the United States are doing to us and , 17 secondswhat it means for the election. You had all this stuff from the FBI leaking out about Hillary Clinton’s emails, midyear , 25 secondsexam, about Donald Trump’s dealings with with Russia.

And a lot of these things were under the table. They were leaks. , 34 secondsThey were illegal. They, you know, late in the election season, we have a a rumor that turns out to be true that , 42 secondsthere’s been a Fiser warrant thrown on one of uh the Trump campaign’s advisers. , 47 secondsRemember FISA warrants, their mere existence is highly classified. So when Heat Street and Louise Mench reported on Carter Page’s FISA, that was espionage. , 59 seconds18 US code 793. Same thing they just indicted John Bolton for. And should people have been indicted for it , 7 secondsimmediately? Absolutely. Was the posture of the Department of Justice such that we didn’t prosecute espionage cuz it might have smacked of journalism?

Yes. , 18 secondsIs that completely a wreck, a mess to clean up? I think so. But then again, I’m the guy in 2010 and 13 when , 26 secondsWikileaks was coming out and we were normalizing the idea of espionage is journalism. I was out there on Twitter with others arguing with Glenn Greenwald that no, espionage is not journalism. , 37 secondsAnd here’s what it led to. It led to spy agencies having competing roles with the media talking about highly classified stuff. , 48 secondsThis stuff should never have happened and it should never happen again. So, I’m glad we’re looking at it. So, Obama says, “Dear spooks, please clean up your , 55 secondsmesses. Go give me your best opinion on what happened with Trump and Russia.” However, before work on the assessment even began, media leaks suggesting that , 4 secondsthe IC had already reached definitive conclusions and it risked creating an anchoring bias.

Ooh. Ooh, I love this. , 12 secondsAnchoring bias is a specific type of cognitive bias that we look at in intelligence analysis. Anchoring bias is somebody comes along when a question has , 21 secondsbeen asked to the analyst and says, “Here’s what I think it And if that person’s your boss, that’s the anchor around which you may do your analysis that might not have anything to do with , 30 secondsthe intelligence that is before you. So here, this is good nerdy tradecraftraft stuff. There’s a problem in how this was , 37 secondsdone by people leaking to the media that, oh yeah, there’s a consensus in the intelligence community that risked creating an anchoring bias for everyone , 46 secondsthat might have known about it or might be writing in the days to follow.

Good stuff to be concerned about. On December 9th, both the Washington Post and New , 54 secondsYork Times reported the IC had concluded with high confidence Russia had intervened specifically to help Trump. , 1 secondAs we know, Obama just ordered everybody to have a meeting on the 9th to go to a final check on everything that’s coming , 8 secondsin. And we know from the A that was put out to the public a few days later that information was rolling in all the time. , 16 secondsThat’s what they told us. And on the 9th of December, some jaboni is going to the post in the New York Times and saying, , 23 seconds”Oh, it’s already done. It Putin wanted Trump.” So, somebody was massaging a narrative top to bottom here.

It’s not good. , 32 secondsProcedural concerns. The director of analysis review identified multiple procedural anomalies in the preparation , 39 secondsof the A. These included a highly compressed production timeline, stringent compartmentation and excessive , 47 secondsinvolvement of agency heads. They get into these all individually as well. , 52 secondsTimeline impact. The highly compressed timeline was atypical for a formal IC assessment which ordinarily can take months to prepare, especially for assessments of such length and complexity and political sensitivity. , 8 secondsCIA’s primary authors, they are spilling the tea here, CIA’s primary authors had less than a week to draft the assessment , 18 secondsand less than 2 days to formally coordinate it with ICPS.

Can we back up for a second and talk about the fact that this is Russia that still had a , 26 secondsnuclear arsenal? if they really interfered in our democracy to this point where they’re going to install an agent in the White House that one of our , 34 secondsoptions might be striking them with a nuclear missile onto Moscow. So the guys having to write this at CIA , 41 secondsheadquarters, they’re like, “Oh my god, if we get this wrong, we might start a war.” And they got what? 48 hours, 96 , 49 secondshours to do this when they’re drafting it. Is not good, my friends. less than a week to draft the assessment. Less than , 55 secondstwo days to coordinate it with the other intelligence agencies before it went into its final review process.

Just as everyone’s leaving Washington for , 4 secondsChristmas break, this is the understatement of the decade. Multiple IC stakeholders felt they felt felt jammed by the compressed timeline. I’ll , 13 secondsbet, you know, no, I got to get I got to get Timmy uh the latest Xbox game. I gotta not start a war with Russia that , 22 secondsinvolves nukes and I I gotta go to the Maryland shore with my family. Oh my god. Here’s where the CIA tradecraft , 29 secondsreview addresses the elephant in the room here. Rushed timeline justified. , 34 secondsICD 203 stipulates that analysis be quote independent of political consideration and must not be distorted , 42 secondsby nor shaped for advocacy of a particular audience, agenda, or policy viewpoint.

The election had concluded , 50 secondsand the ICA was essentially a post-mortem analysis. Therefore, the rushed timeline to publish both , 57 secondsclassified and unclassified versions before the presidential transition raised questions about a potential , 4 secondspolitical motive behind the White House tasking and timeline. I’ll say they wanted this out ASAP , 13 secondsso that the CIA could do this before Trump sat down and would have operational control over the CIA. , 22 secondsAlmost says that the CIA was not going to get along with the guy who would be using the CIA to protect the United States only a few weeks away. That’s a , 32 secondsreally troubling conflict to to resolve here as to why that wouldn’t be a , 39 secondsterrible precedent setting up an awful tension between the White House and the , 47 secondsCentral Intelligence Agency.

And of course, that appears to be what happened. Compartmentation challenges. , 53 secondsThis is who has access to which type of intelligence. Uneven access to highly compartmented information further complicated coordination and review and contributed to analytic differences on the ICA’s most contentious point. In , 8 secondsother words, not enough analysts got access to anything that really said Vladimir Putin preferred Trump. Central , 16 secondsto the judgment that Putin quote aspired to help Trump win was one highly classified CIA report. Brennan had , 25 secondstightly restricted access to this information within CIA. It had been collected in July, but not disseminated , 32 secondsin CIA serialized reporting until the week of December 19th, 2016.

Question there, was that the Steel Dossier? The , 40 secondsCIA drafters had enjoyed privileged access to this information through participation in a highly compartmented analytic effort known as the Fusion , 48 secondsCell, which Brennan had created in July to focus on the IC’s growing concern about Russian election interference. But , 55 secondsthe way they handled all this intel just looks really weird in retrospect. One CIA manager stated that uneven access to compartmented information among ICA , 3 secondscoordinators and reviewers contributed to an already chaotic process. He said some key analysts and managers were not , 10 secondscleared to review the ICA’s most controversial aspects and were only able to see portions of the draft out of context.

And this makes no sense to me. , 19 secondsThese guys all have clearances. If Vladimir Putin really wanted Trump that bad, we got audio of him. We’ve got payments here and there. How do these , 27 secondsguys with clearances not have permission to go look at it? Unless maybe it didn’t quite exist and that’s what they didn’t have permission to go look at. Maybe , 35 secondsthere’s like two dudes who had access to the steel dossier and they’re like, “Oh, it’s super super secret. You can’t see all the terrible stuff we have on Trump , 44 secondsand Putin because it’s it’s just so incredibly sensitive, which is almost exactly how they handle all the stuff around Iraq. Oh, Iraq, terrible weapons, , 52 secondsamazing weapons.

It’s just they’re going to hit Cleveland. They’re going to hit Tulsa. Oh, you you’re not cleared to see it.” Here’s another contradiction in , 59 secondsterms. A report in 2017 indicated that the highest classified version of the ICA had been shared with more than 200 US officials. This is unusually high for , 8 secondssuch a highly compartmented product and calls into question whether the extreme limitations on access to underlying intelligence within the IC during the , 15 secondspreparation was justifiable. In other words, we compartmented the hell out of the people writing the thing to see just , 23 secondswhy certain people at CIA thought that Putin wanted Trump. But then they distributed the report far and wide.

If , 32 secondsthis was so sensitive, why didn’t you let the people writing it have access to the supposed smoking guns about Trump , 41 secondsand Putin? Unless all of this worked exactly like y’all made it work during the Iraq war runup, which is interesting , 50 secondsbecause Brennan and Clapper were involved in the runup to Iraq on fake intelligence as well. So, this is starting to look like a very terrible , 57 secondspattern. Speaking of agency heads, agency head involvement. While agency heads sometimes review controversial analytic assessments before publication, , 6 secondstheir direct engagement in the ICA’s development was highly unusual in scope and intensity. To me, that that says , 16 secondsBrennan cooked this up with his buddy Clapper.

I I don’t like putting these things in such a stark tone and manner, , 25 secondsbut this just looks like a few guys, just like in Iraq, a few guys lied us into a war that lasted 20 years. Guys, , 32 secondsthe point is we could go all day with this. There’s eight pages to the Trade Craft review. It says that key agencies were cut out without explanation, like , 41 secondsState Department INR, and the Defense Intelligence Agency. says that the Steel Dossier was officially jammed in and they said, “We didn’t really use it to reach our conclusions, but they did. , 50 secondsThat’s a lie as well.” On and on it goes. Either way, the intelligence agencies through the director of , 58 secondsnational intelligence, Jim Clapper, decided to get involved with the American political discussion in a way that is completely inappropriate.

And on , 7 secondstop of it, you got this Brennan guy who took control of the analytic and drafting process and jammed this thing through to be able to sit in front of , 16 secondsCongress before Trump sat down. And most importantly, the conclusions that they reached were , 24 secondsdog that were supported basically by no intelligence with the same trust us, it’s classified that they used to , 33 secondslie us into the Iraq war, killing countless innocent people. This is a terrible thing and it seems rather , 40 secondscriminal and as a result, especially since Brennan lied about it under oath, he may go to prison over it. So might Jim Clapper, so might a bunch of other , 48 secondspeople. And no matter what you think about Trump, and there was a bunch going on between Trump and Russia in this time period, he had Paul Maniffort a as a , 57 secondscampaign manager.

His people were meeting with the Russians in April of 2016 at the May floor hotel. He did buy , 5 secondsa house from the Russians and made 50 million off the top in a really dodgy way. All of those were reasonable questions, like after he fires Jim Comey , 13 secondsand invites the Russians on over. All of that led to serious questions, but that’s very different than the , 20 secondsintelligence community coming out and telling us, “Hey, we’ve got secret intelligence that says this guy really works for Vladimir Putin and it’s , 27 secondsterrible.” Um, so maybe there’s going to be criminal prosecutions. I can’t wait to learn more. Hit like, hit subscribe, and I will see you in the comments. , 38 secondsThanks for spending this time with me.