Declassified House Report Details Fundamental Flaws in Russia Assessment

 

 

Declassified House Report Details Fundamental Flaws in Russia Assessment

 

A CIA officer was quoted as saying, ‘We don’t have direct information that Putin wanted to get Trump elected.’

 

7/23/2025

By Zachary Stieber

Reprinted from The Epoch Times

 

A declassified House Intelligence Committee report dated Sept. 18, 2020, found that several intelligence reports that suggested Russian President Vladimir Putin aspired to help then-presidential candidate Donald Trump in the months leading up to the 2016 presidential election were “substandard.”

Specifically, three reports published internally by the CIA after the election contained information that was potentially biased, implausible, unclear, or of uncertain origin, the House Intelligence Committee said in the report that was released by the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) on Wednesday.

“One scant, unclear, and unverifiable fragment of a sentence from one of the substandard reports constitutes the only classified information to suggest Putin ‘aspired’ to help Trump win,” the panel stated.

The intelligence community “ignored or selectively quoted reliable intelligence reports that challenged—and in some cases undermined—judgments that Putin sought to elect Trump” and failed to consider plausible alternative explanations, it stated.

Trump defeated former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election.

DNI Tulsi Gabbard declassified the House report and published it online.
In an intelligence community document released in 2017, the FBI, CIA, and National Security Agency stated that Putin and the Russian government “aspired to help President-elect Trump’s election chances when possible by discrediting Secretary Clinton and publicly contrasting her unfavorably to him.”

The CIA and FBI were described as having high confidence in the judgment, while the security agency had moderate confidence.

The House Intelligence Committee examined the agencies’ sources and determined that the conclusion that Russia backed Trump did not meet the standards of proper tradecraft, according to the declassified report.

The conclusion that Putin tried to help Trump win rested on a questionable interpretation of an unclear fragment of a sentence that referenced how Putin allegedly chose to leak Democratic National Committee (DNC) emails that officials say Russia stole in a hack, according to the report.

“Putin had made this decision [to leak DNC emails] after he had come to believe that the Democratic nominee had better odds of winning the U.S. presidential election, and that [Trump], whose victory Putin was counting on, most likely would not be able to pull off a convincing victory,” the source sentence stated, according to the committee.

A senior CIA officer was quoted in the report as saying, “We don’t know what was meant by that,” and “five people read it five ways.”

A CIA officer was quoted as saying, “We don’t have direct information that Putin wanted to get Trump elected.”

High-confidence judgments are supposed to rest on high-quality information from multiple sources.

Intelligence officials also failed to provide alternative perspectives and contrary information, selectively omitting quotes from reports that contradicted the judgments on Putin’s intentions while including quotes from the same reports that supported the judgment, lawmakers said.

CIA officers omitted the ambiguous fragment from the first version of the report, but agency officials overruled the decision and included it in a revised version, according to the House Intelligence report.

John Brennan, CIA director at the time, did not respond to requests for comment. He has previously defended the intelligence assessment.

The House Intelligence Committee stated that its investigators spent more than 2,300 hours working on the report, reviewing documents and conducting interviews.

The Senate Intelligence Committee stated in 2018 that the judgment was supported by intelligence and open-supporting information.
The new declassification came after the CIA in June stated that a review of the assessment determined that the CIA did not adhere to tradecraft guidelines when putting forth the claim that Putin aspired to help Trump win, in part because it relied on a single source, a classified CIA report.

Although that report was of high quality, without it, the judgment “essentially rested on an assessment of the public behavior of senior Russian officials and state-controlled media, and on logic,” the CIA review states.

“Most analysts judged that denigrating Clinton equaled supporting Trump; they reasoned that in a two-person race the tradeoff was zero-sum. This logic train was plausible and sensible, but was an inference rather than fact sourced to multiple reporting streams,” it reads.

It also came after Gabbard released other declassified documents that show how then-President Barack Obama directed intelligence officials after the 2016 election to create an assessment of how Russia influenced the election.
“Their goal was to subvert the will of the American people and enact what was essentially a years-long coup with the objective of trying to usurp the President from fulfilling the mandate bestowed upon him by the American people,” Gabbard said in a statement last week.
President Donald Trump, when asked about Gabbard’s criminal referrals to the Department of Justice based on information in the declassified documents, said at the White House on July 22 that Obama is guilty of treason.
Obama said in response in a July 22 statement that Russia “worked to influence the 2016 presidential election but did not successfully manipulate any votes.”