President Trump’s top spy chief will review the underlying intelligence in January 2017’s Intelligence Community Assessment on Russian election interference and may declassify more from the House Intelligence Committee’s 2018 report on Kremlin meddling.
John Ratcliffe, who was confirmed as director of national intelligence last month to replace former acting DNI Richard Grenell permanently, outlined his intentions in a Monday letter to House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff and ranking member Rep. Devin Nunes.
“During my May 5, 2020 nomination hearing before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI), I made a commitment to review the intelligence underlying the 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) regarding Russian activities and intentions in the 2016 U.S. elections,” Ratcliffe wrote in the letter that was obtained by the Washington Examiner. “I advised that within the first six months of my tenure I would review the underlying intelligence as it relates to the findings contained in Volume 4 of the SSCI’s Report on Russian Active Measures Campaigns and Interference in the 2016 U.S. Election and the 2018 House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) Report on Russian active measures.”
Ratcliffe requested an unredacted copy of the House report “in order to facilitate my review,” as he noted, “The report itself remains a Committee record.” He said, “In order to provide for appropriate transparency on matters of public interest, we intend to perform an updated classification review of the Committee’s report to account for information that has been declassified subsequent to the report’s release.”
On Wednesday, Ratcliffe wrote to Republican Sens. Chuck Grassley and Ron Johnson, telling them he had a “shared interest in public transparency consistent with the need to protect classified information” and “to ensure that the IC does not encroach on Congressional prerogatives, I have requested that the Chairman of HPSCI share a copy of the report with me so that the IC can conduct a classification review.”
He also provided them with a declassified version of the annex attached to the 2017 assessment related to British ex-spy Christopher Steele dossier’s unverified allegations.
The Senate Intelligence Committee released a bipartisan report in April defending 2017’s assessment and finding no evidence of political pressure to reach a specific conclusion. It determined the assessment by the CIA, FBI, and National Security Agency “presents a coherent and well-constructed intelligence basis” for its conclusions.
The 2017 assessment concluded with “high confidence” that Russian President Vladimir Putin “ordered an influence campaign in 2016” and that Russia worked to “undermine public faith in the U.S. democratic process, denigrate former Secretary of State Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency” and “developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump.” The NSA diverged from the FBI and CIA on one aspect: expressing only “moderate” rather than “high” confidence that Putin actively tried to help Trump and harm Clinton.
The Senate committee said the evidence “showed that Moscow sought to denigrate” Hillary Clinton and that “specific intelligence reporting” supported the ICA’s conclusion that “Putin and the Russian Government demonstrated a preference” for Trump.
The Senate findings clashed with the 2018 report from the House Intelligence Committee, then chaired by Nunes.
The GOP-led assessment concluded that “the majority of the Intelligence Community Assessment judgments on Russia’s election activities employed proper analytic tradecraft” but that the “judgments on Putin’s strategic intentions did not.” The report said it “identified significant intelligence tradecraft failings that undermine confidence in the ICA judgments regarding … Putin’s strategic objectives for disrupting the U.S. election.”
The Democrats on the panel, led by then-ranking member Schiff, released their own report saying they “found no evidence that calls into question the quality and reliability of the ICA’s … assessment about President Putin’s desire to help candidate Trump.”
During his May confirmation hearing, Ratcliffe said he had “no reason to dispute” either the findings of the Senate Intelligence Committee or of the House Intelligence Committee and noted the two had “a different perspective with regard to … a preference for a candidate.” He said he respected both committees but hadn’t seen the “underlying intelligence to tell me why there is a difference of opinion.”
“My views are Russia meddled or interfered with active measures in 2016, they interfered in 2018, and they will attempt to do so in 2020,” Ratcliffe testified, adding, “I’m for safe, secure, credible elections, and I will do everything that I can as DNI to ensure they are not successful.”
Ratcliffe, who served as a Texas congressman up until his confirmation, was a Republican member of the House Intelligence Committee.
When the Washington Examiner reached out to Schiff’s office, it pointed to a Politico article, which reported that a Schiff aide said the chairman “won’t object” to Ratcliffe’s request to look at the unredacted report. The aide claimed, “The GOP report remains a transparent effort to rewrite the history of the 2016 election.” Schiff would still have to provide the unredacted report to Ratcliffe.
Fred Fleitz, a former chief of staff of the National Security Council, wrote in a Fox News op-ed last month that House Intelligence staff told him that former CIA Director John Brennan “suppressed facts or analysis that showed why it was not in Russia’s interests to support Trump and why Putin stood to benefit from Hillary Clinton’s election.” These claims have not been confirmed.
U.S. Attorney John Durham is investigating the origins and conduct of the Trump-Russia investigation, and he is looking into Brennan and the ICA.
Fiona Hill, the Trump administration’s former Russia expert on the National Security Council, testified to Congress last year during the impeachment investigation that the Russians targeted both Trump and Clinton in 2016 to ensure whoever won would be damaged when taking office. Hill said the Russians targeted both “to delegitimize our entire presidency.”
“The goal of the Russians was really to put whoever became the president, by trying to tip their hands on one side of the scale, under a cloud,” she said, adding, “They seed misinformation, they seed doubt, they have everybody questioning the legitimacy of a presidential candidate, be it President Trump or potentially President Clinton, that they would pit one side of our electorate against the other.”
She also testified that Steele’s dossier was a “rabbit hole” that “very likely” contained Russian disinformation, and the former MI6 agent “could have been played” by the Russians. Declassified footnotes from DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s December report show the FBI was aware Steele’s dossier may have been compromised by Russian intelligence.
Robert Mueller’s 2019 report concluded that Russia interfered in a “sweeping and systematic fashion.” But the special counsel “did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.”
