Brennan and Clapper Defend Their Work

John Brennan and James Clapper teemed up yesterday to write an opinion piece for the NY Times defending their work on an Intelligence Community Assessment about the 2016 election. It’s titled “Brennan and Clapper: Let’s Set the Record Straight on Russia and 2016.”

The Brennan-Clapper opinion piece (BCOP) can really be broken down into three parts. First is a summary of the previous reviews of their work, all of which concluded it was fine.

While some external critiques have noted that parts of the Russia investigation could have been handled better, multiple, thorough, yearslong reviews of the assessment have validated its findings and the rigor of its analysis. The most noteworthy was the unanimous, bipartisan, five-volume report issued by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, whose Republican members at the time included Marco Rubio, now the secretary of state, and Senator Tom Cotton, now the committee chairman.

“In all the interviews of those who drafted and prepared the [assessment], the Committee heard consistently that analysts were under no politically motivated pressure to reach specific conclusions,” the Senate report said. “All analysts expressed that they were free to debate, object to content and assess confidence levels, as is normal and proper for the analytic process.”

All of this may be true so far as it goes, but the point of DNI Gabbard’s recent statements is to highlight the fact that there is new information which goes directly to the points the BCOP is relying on. For instance, Gabbard has revealed that it was President Obama who directed the creation of a new ICA looking into Russian meddling in the election.

As for the proper analytic process, the information released by Gabbard suggests the IC went from thinking there was some generalized attempts by Russia to interfere with the election to, after a meeting on Dec. 9, reaching a new conclusion that Putin wanted to help Trump. This was the result of the FBI initially walking away from a joint ICA, saying they would produce their own report. The Dec. 9 meeting was an attempt to bring the FBI back to the table. And what the FBI wanted, apparently, was to include the dossier in the ICA.

Meanwhile, the new documents also revealed that at least two experienced people within the CIA told Brennan that there was no way to support the claim that Putin wanted to help Trump win. Brennan overruled them.

The senior intelligence officials pointed out the lack of evidence to substantiate the claim. “We have no intelligence to directly support this ‘aspiration’ point,” said one member of the small group of individuals working with Brennan, FBI Director James Comey, and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper on the assessment of Russian activity in the lead-up to the 2016 election.

The official worried that the inclusion of the claim would “open the IC to a line of very politicized inquiry that is sure to come up when this paper is shared with the Hill.”…

Brennan called the dissenting individuals into his office on Dec. 30, 2016, and had a lengthy meeting in which they articulated their serious concerns. “The assessment will stay the same,” Brennan reported at the end of the meeting.

Analysts did express their views but they were ultimately ignored in favor of top-down conclusions.

LIE: Putin and the Russian Government helped Trump win the 2016 election

TRUTH: President Obama, former Director of the CIA John Brennan, and others fabricated the Russia Hoax, suppressed intelligence showing Putin was preparing for a Clinton victory, manufactured findings from… pic.twitter.com/nkaLDMrUSv

— DNI Tulsi Gabbard (@DNIGabbard) July 23, 2025

Section two of the BCOP is a response to three specific errors the authors claim DNI Gabbard is making:

First, the so-called Steele Dossier, a series of memos, now largely discredited, about purported Trump-Russia links written by a former British intelligence agent. Ms. Gabbard and Mr. Ratcliffe have claimed it played an integral role in formulating the assessment. We have testified under oath, and the reviews of the assessment have confirmed, that the dossier was not used as a source or taken into account for any of its analysis or conclusions. At the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s insistence, a short summary of the dossier was added as a separate annex only to the most highly classified version of the document that contained the assessment. That annex also explained why the dossier was not used in the assessment.

Second, the assessment made no judgment about the impact of Russian information operations on the outcome of the election. While some state and local electoral boards and voter information and registration systems were accessed by Russian intelligence, the assessment made clear that none of those types of systems were involved in counting votes. Russian influence operations might have shaped the views of Americans before they entered the voting booth, but we found no evidence that the Russians changed any actual votes.

Finally, and contrary to the Trump administration’s wild and baseless claims, there was no mention of “collusion” between the Trump campaign and the Russians in the assessment, nor any reference to the publicly acknowledged contacts that had taken place.

Under point one, the idea that the dossier “was not used” is contradicted by the fact that the FBI not only shoe-horned a 2-page summary of the dossier into an annex but in the most classified version of the report (above top secret) the dossier got its own bullet point in the main document under a heading about Russia trying to help Trump win. Bullet point four directed the reader to the annex for “additional reporting on Russia’s plans and intentions.”

I don’t blame you for turning off your replies. It’d be a real problem for you if everyone filled up your comments with proof you’re lying. https://t.co/lsxjLQ3Wrq pic.twitter.com/y5MN9b8oLM

— Sean Davis (@seanmdav) July 31, 2025

It’s true there was a disclaimer in the annex saying the dossier wasn’t used to generate any conclusions but including a bullet point about the annex in the main body made it look like it was support for the claim Russia wanted to help Trump win.

LIE: The fabricated Steele Dossier was not used as a source in the Obama Administration’s January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment of the November 2016 election

TRUTH: Not only did CIA Director Brennan, FBI Director Comey, DNI Clapper and others include the Steele Dossier… pic.twitter.com/1927wVPJSK

— DNI Tulsi Gabbard (@DNIGabbard) July 23, 2025

Point two is responding to a claim I don’t think anyone is making. DNI Gabbard hasn’t claimed that Russia “hacked the election” (that was a left-wing talking point in 2016) or that Russia made no efforts to influence the election. In fact, Politico clarified this point last week:

While Gabbard acknowledged that Russia wanted to sow discord in the election, she said it did not collude with Trump or prefer him to win. As proof, Gabbard said Russian President Vladimir Putin’s decision not to release damaging information about Hillary Clinton — whose 2016 campaign was targeted by a barrage of Wikileaks revelations — showed that the Kremlin did not have a preferred candidate.

But the new information does not dispute the intelligence community’s 2016 conclusion that Russia and its president meddled in the election in hopes of damaging Clinton, who, as Gabbard noted, Moscow thought would win. It largely questions how the intelligence community arrived at its high-confidence assessment that Putin “aspired” to see Trump win.

Finally, on point three, it appears the annex about the Steele dossier didn’t use the word “collusion” but it did describe a working relationship between the Trump team and Kremlin and alleged Trump had been cultivated and compromised by Russia. It’s collusion minus the word collusion.

Brennan & Clapper make three big claims on Steele Dossier & collusion, all false. Dossier *is* taken into account in ICA & is cited in body of most highly-class version. Brennan *did* insist on dossier’s inclusion. And collusion *is* alleged in annex the ICA directed readers to. pic.twitter.com/D3UtpcDrLL

— Jerry Dunleavy IV 🇺🇸 (@JerryDunleavy) July 31, 2025

The third (and funniest) section of the BCOP is the author’s claim that they, as dedicated IC professionals, did everything they could to keep this information under wraps. [emphasis added]

There is a remarkable irony about this whole affair. Despite claims by Trump administration officials of a nefarious political conspiracy, we did everything we could at the time to prevent leaks of intelligence reports, including Russia’s preference for Mr. Trump, a requirement that President Obama regularly emphasized. We knew such reports would be political dynamite. And despite substantial reporting on the matter, we succeeded in preventing such leaks before the election.

As Matt Taibbi has argued, the real tell that this was intended to damage Trump rather than reflect reality is that less than 24 hours after these new conclusions were reached at the Dec. 9 meeting, the entire story about Russia supporting Trump leaked to the NY Times. If that’s success I’d hate to see what failure looks like.

And of course it only got worse from there. Brennan knew the dossier was circulating among media outlets long before it became public. It was the decision to brief the president on an Intelligence Community Assessment that included an annex about the dossier that created the news hook CNN needed to reveal its existence. And within a matter of days, Ben Smith’s Buzzfeed would publish the whole thing on the grounds that it was in the news.

As Brennan and Clapper say above, they knew this information was “political dynamite” well before it was ever released. No doubt James Comey also knew this when Comey’s FBI demanded the dossier be included in the Obama-directed ICA. Brennan knew it was dynamite when he overruled high-level CIA officials and said it would remain in the ICA over their objections.

It sure looks like they set all this up as a way to accomplish what the Clinton campaign had tried but failed to do prior to the election, i.e. drag the political dynamite into the public square and make sure it blew up Trump’s first term (having failed to blow up his candidacy in time to stop his win). Hillary’s attempts to launder this same information through the media prior to the election mostly hadn’t worked. Why? Because despite handing the dossier over to the FBI, it still wasn’t seen as credible enough to report on by most news outlets. But Comey, Brennan and Clapper gave it the credibility it needed by forcing it into the ICA (in an annex with a disclaimer, but still it was there). With an assist from CNN and Buzzfeed, it became a raging dumpster fire for the next two years. Mission accomplished.

Comey and Brennan are undeniably anti-Trump partisans. Brennan has literally accused Trump of treason. There’s no question they had a political motive here, one the mainstream media continues to ignore in favor of the convenient fiction that only people aligned with Trump play politics.

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