In July, ODNI declassified and released 2017 HPSCI(Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence) Majority staff report regarding "Russia's Influence Campaign Targeting the 2016 US Presidential Election". Below is the link to ODNI press release:
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President Obama directed the creation of this January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment after President Trump defeated Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election, and it served as the basis for what was essentially a years-long coup against the duly elected President of the United States, subverting the will of the American people and attempting to delegitimize Donald Trump’s presidency.
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The declassified 46-page report in PDF format can be downloaded via the link below:
I'm archiving its text to make it searchable here. This is part 14.
In Citing tne Dossier, the ICA Violated ICD 203 Tenets For Proper Source Description. While referring to the Dossier as "additional reporting" of Putin's intentions, the ICA failed to mention significant information - known to the FBI during the drafting process - that speaks to source bias and credibility. According to the FBI agent responsible for obtaining the dossier and other sources, prior to incorporating the Dossier into the ICA, Mr. Steele:
Told a senior Department of Justice official in September 2016 that he was "desperate that Donald Trump not get elected and was passionate about him not being President."(redacted)
Told an FBI agent on 1 November 2016 that he was angry at the FBI Director for reopening the investigation into the Clinton email scandal.(redacted)
Was terminated by the FBI on 1 November 2016 for being dishonest after the FBI learned he had violated his agreement with them by discussing with the media the dossier and his FBI relationship.(redacted)
Told the FBI and media sources that he was angry that the FBI was investigating Secretary Clinton's email server scandal instead of Trump's ties to Russia.(redacted)
Had admitted to be working for Fusion GPS, a political messaging company being retained by the Clinton Campaign and the Democratic National Committee (DNC) to gather and disseminate anti-Trump disinformation,(redacted)
By omitting these vital problems affecting source credibility, the ICA violated ICD 203 directives that analysis "properly describes quality and credibility of underlying sources" affecting source quality and credibility, including "source access, validation, motivation, and possible bias."(redacted)
Tne Dossier Was Misleadingly Described Using Intelligence Terminology That Implied It Was From a Legitimate FBI HUMINT Source. The ICA further lent an inaccurate sense of credibility to the dossier by describing it using intelligence terminology, but without addressing all of the serious intelligence tradecraft red flags that characterized the dossier. Reporting from "an FBI source" implies that the information was acquired following standard source validation and that any shortcomings would highlighted to the reader. This did not occur in the ICA.
The ICA misleadingly described the dossier as coming from "an FBI source." But Mr. Steele was not an FBI source as he had already been fired two months before the ICA was published for lying to the Bureau, critical information that should have been clarified.(redacted)
The ICA also describes dossier information as collected from "a layered network of identified and unidentified subsources" although the ICA did not clarify that FBI and CIA had so few details on the alleged network, that they didn't know if this material was all or in part fabricated by Mr. Steele, his subsources, or if it was Russian disinformation fed to the subsources.(redacted)
While generically mentioning Steele's alleged network included "identified and unidentified subsources", the ICA omitted that FBI and CIA could not verify the dossier chain of acquisition or the accesses, reliability, motivations, biases, and reporting records of any of the alleged subsources who actually acquired the information.(redacted)
The ICA Made False, Misleading, or Incomplete Statements in Summarizing the Dossier. Compounding the tradecraft errors on identifying source credibility, the ICA also included statements that, through misstatement or omission, were false or misleading based on publicly released FBI information, media reporting, and other classified sources.
The nature of these misleading statements indicates the ICA author intended to distract the reader from the many tradecraft problems that made the dossier unreliable. This raises questions about why the Directors of CIA and FBI insisted this material be included.
The ICA claimed the source "collected this information on behalf of private clients" while failing to note those clients - the DNC and the Clinton campaign - were Candidate Trump's political opponents, information known to the FBI at the time.
This was extraordinarily important for assessing source motivation and the veracity of his reporting, and it was intentionally omitted based on analysis of the testimony of Steele's FBI handler, Fusion GPS officials, and media exposures of the relationship.(redacted)
The ICA also excluded that the political messaging firm that hired the dossier author, Fusion GPS, was also working on behalf of Russian interests to uncover information that was shared with the Kremlin, raising serious counterintelligence concerns over possible Russian influence on the dossier.(redacted)
The ICA misleadingly claimed that "the source...was not compensated for [the dossier information] by the FBI," when in fact the FBI had authorized payment of $25,000 to Mr. Steele for his initial work on the dossier prior to his termination, according to the FBI agent working the case. (He didn't receive the money because the FBI bureaucracy had not processed the payment fast enough before Steele was fired.)(redacted)
It is not clear why did the ICA authors decide to cover-up these payments.
Given the poor quality and bias of dossier reporting, this also raises questions about the motivations of the FBI leadership, in particular, who used use government funds to pay for junk produced by a political campaign.(redacted)
The ICA falsely claimed that Mr. Steele's reporting "appears to have been acquired by multiple Western press organizations starting in October" when the FBI knew - because Mr. Steele told them - that he had delivered the dossier to the media well before that.
- According to the testimony of the FBI agent and later confirmed by Mr. Steele's own testimony in a British court, Mr. Steele had peddled the dossier to five major media outlets at least as early as September 2016. Moreover, on 23 September, the US news outlet Yahoo! published an article about the dossier sourced to Mr. Steele.(redacted)
The dossier was not accidentally "acquired" by probing journalists, as the ICA suggests. It is not clear why the ICA covered-up that the dossier was deliberately fed to the media by the FBI former source, Mr. Steele, as political messaging on behalf of the Clinton campaign and DNC.(redacted)
The ICA analysis of the dossier also did not take the form of a defensive counterintelligence briefing, as The Director of FBI and Department of Justice officials testified. The credibility of the FBI Director's claim that the dossier needed to be included in the ICA to "warn the President that it was out there" is destroyed by the fact that the most essential evidence affecting the credibility of the dossier was intentionally omitted by FBI and CIA.(redacted)
A true defensive briefing, ostensibly to warn Trump of Russian threats to himself or his staff, would not have omitted so much key information, nor would it have excluded information on Trump's associates, such as Carter Page.(redacted)
It also would have been inappropriate to share defensive briefing data in a document disseminated to CIA analysts and 250 other US government officials, including appointees who were candidate Trump's political opponents.(redacted)
By leaving out so much critical information - the dossier's origins, purpose, sponsors, and source bias - all of which would have undermined the product's credibility, the ICA falsely encouraged senior policymakers to draw alarmist conclusions about the dossier's significance that were not warranted by evidence. This was subsequently confirmed by numerous questions and concerns about the dossier - voiced by President Trump and the White House staff - after the publication of the ICA.(redacted)