Last week, we published two stories about a senior CIA whistleblower who was one of four CIA analysts who helped write a January 2017 “Intelligence Community Assessment” (ICA) that falsely claimed, with high confidence, that Russian President Vladimir Putin sought to help elect President Donald Trump in 2016. The person said that the CIA Director under Obama, John Brennan, had a “pathological need for control” and put the writers of the ICA “under duress” to include a mention of a fraudulent dossier, commissioned by the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign. The CIA also included in the classified version of the ICA an annex consisting of the dossier written by a former British spy, which went to roughly 200 people in Washington, some of whom leaked related information to journalists.
Unfortunately, the CIA employee said, his employer remains corrupted by “systemic rot” and that crucial steps “have not been put in place" to prevent a Russiagate-like abuse of power from happening again, since the arrival of its new director, John Ratcliffe, in January of this year. “Two critical steps that have not been put in place are,” said the senior analyst turned whistleblower, “to first, formalize expectations about the delivery timeline for sensitive intelligence analyses, and second, to remove the CIA Director from the review process of intelligence reporting or finished analysis.”
