Daily Caller
CIA Analysts Who Helped Cook Up Phony Russiagate Intel Still Thriving In Deep State, Former Spy Says
President Barack Obama meets with John Brennan, Deputy National Security Advisor for Counterterrorism and Homeland Security, in the Oval Office, Jan. 4, 2010. (Official White House photo by Pete Souza)
From the Daily Caller News Foundation
By Emily Kopp
Two analysts who helped Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Director John Brennan discredit President Donald Trump through weak or phony intelligence on Russian election interference continue to cash paychecks from the agency, according to a former CIA operations officer.
“At least two still do work there. That doesn’t mean that all of the other people have left. Those are just the two that I’m aware of,” former CIA Operations Officer Bryan Dean Wright told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
One of former authors remains in possession of a “blue badge,” meaning they remain a CIA employee, while another possesses a “green badge,” and continues to do contract work for the agency as a contractor, Wright said. Others may retain their security clearances.
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Wright has not held back his opinion about his former boss: He said in a recent op-ed that should “rot in prison” for undermining the integrity of the Republic.
“These men thought they knew what was best for America, and they didn’t give a damn what voters like you thought,” he wrote.
Brennan — whose tenure at CIA spanned decades — likely cultivated generations of like-minded CIA employees, Wright said. The former CIA director’s influence probably continues to shape the agency’s culture by way of mentorships, friendships, promotion panels and hiring offices.
The CIA did not respond to requests for comment. A request for comment from Brennan through his law firm WestExec Advisors did not receive a reply.
Documents declassified by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard in recent days have revealed that President Barack Obama’s intelligence chiefs spun, cherrypicked and in some cases wholly manufactured raw intelligence reports to support the narrative — predetermined in leaks to the media — that Russian President Vladimir Putin had a “clear preference” for Trump and “aspired to help his election chances when possible by discrediting Secretary Clinton.”
The resulting 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment touched off years of Russiagate media frenzy. Though technically endorsed by the “big three” — the CIA, FBI and National Security Agency — just five CIA analysts under Brennan wrote the assessment, according to a House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence report declassified on July 23. The analysts were plucked from a “Fusion Cell” Brennan had formed months earlier to examine Russian election interference, according to a CIA self-assessment declassified on July 2.
Those analysts worked hand-in-glove with Brennan, churning out an assessment in less than a week in the days leading up to Christmas. Brennan hid the “sensitive intelligence” — the unverified, slanted and irrelevant raw intelligence reports — from other elements of the intelligence community until a two-day review process. The review happened using a card copy that was shuttled between Langley, Washington, DC, and Fort Meade, the report indicates.
Despite the revelations, there have been few assurances that analysts whose names are unknown and may remain embedded in the Deep State no longer play a role in U.S. national security.
During my tenure here as the Deputy Director of the FBI, I have repeatedly relayed to you that things are happening that might not be immediately visible, but they are happening.
The Director and I are committed to stamping out public corruption and the political weaponization…
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It’s not atypical for the CIA to conduct internal investigations of its personnel, from audits of timecards to counterintelligence probes to ensure foreign spies do not infiltrate U.S. intelligence, Wright said.
Yet the CIA assessment of its own “tradecraft” in assembling the ICA omitted full details about the significant flaws of the raw intelligence reports underlying its judgements. The deputy director of CIA for analysis, who is unnamed in the report, wrote that CIA analysts were subject to “procedural anomalies” and Brennan’s outsized influence. The CIA assessment also concedes its ICA was weakened by the inclusion of the Steele dossier, a salacious Democratic opposition research file on Trump. Yet the report also claims the ICA had “analytic rigor” which “exceeded that of most IC assessments.”
The report conceded that the CIA’s “high confidence” that Russian authorities “aspired” for Trump to win was unwarranted given it was based in only one report. But the CIA’s self-assessment did not give full insight into the weaknesses of that report.
“While the DA Review identified specific procedural and tradecraft issues with the one judgment, these issues should not be interpreted as indicative of broader systemic problems in the IC’s analytic processes or standards,” the CIA deputy director wrote.
House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence Chair Rick Crawford proclaimed the report a “whitewash” within hours of its release, setting in motion the declassification of his committee’s more strident report.
“The report was produced in the 116th Congress under Devin Nunes despite extraordinary restrictions placed by the CIA. Among those restrictions are a prohibition on transporting the document to secure spaces on Capitol Hill,” Crawford said.
It would only become apparent when the congressional investigation’s report was declassified three weeks later that the “aspired” judgement relied on a fragment of a sentence from a single human intelligence report.
“Putin had made this decision [to leak the DNC emails] after he had come to believe that the Democratic nominee had better odds of winning the U.S. presidential election, and that [candidate Trump], whose victory Putin was counting on, most likely would not be able to pull off a convincing victory,” the report read.
The “aspired” judgement hinged on the clause “whose victory Putin was counting on,” which five CIA officers interpreted five different ways, the report states.
CIA Director John Ratcliffe himself called attention to a lack of accountability around intelligence failures and deceptions in a 2023 op-ed. CIA senior bureaucrats hold lifetime appointments, maintaining their rank and pay even when overseeing major failures — a practice Congress should move to end, Ratcliffe wrote.
“Officials who betray the public trust—either by bad acts in office or by politicizing their credentials after leaving—should be stripped of their security clearances,” Ratcliffe wrote.
But experts told the DCNF that Ratcliffe could encounter a hostile CIA culture in implementing any reforms.
CIA officer training includes a video of drafters of an intelligence estimate alleging Iraqi weapons of mass destruction expressing regret, according to Wright. Few analysts would want to see themselves as responsible for an intelligence failure that could set back their careers.
At the same time, a lack of accountability could contribute to a culture of stagnation and decline in professionalism in Langley.
“The CIA has become so severely politicized that it has fundamentally lowered its standards of integrity in collecting and assessing intelligence, and analysts come up with what are often very weak intelligence assessments,” said J. Michael Waller, senior analyst for strategy at the Center for Security Policy. “I used to think it was grossly irresponsible hyperbole to compare the CIA to the KGB, but you really have to wonder, have the CIA and other intelligence community elements become a state within a state?”
From the Daily Caller News Foundation
Nearly 3,000 people died across New York City, Washington, D.C., and Shanksville, Pa. during the 9/11 attacks, according to the Pew Research Center. When asked directly on “Special Report with Bret Baier” if he regrets the attack, al-Sharaa distanced himself entirely from the event.
“I was only 19 years old, so I was a very young person, and I didn’t have any decision-making power at that time, and I don’t have anything to do with it,” al-Sharaa said. “And al-Qaeda was not present right then in my area. So you’re speaking to the wrong person about this subject.”
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The Syrian leader then shifted the conversation.
WATCH:
“We mourn for every civilian that got killed, and we know that people suffer from the war, especially civilians who pay the price, a hefty price for the war,” al-Sharaa said.
President Donald Trump hosted al-Sharaa at the White House on Monday, welcoming the former al-Qaeda member who once fought U.S. forces in Iraq and served time in Abu Ghraib prison. The U.S. government removed al-Sharaa from its terror list just days before his meeting with Trump, according to CBS News.
Al-Sharaa, who led a rebel coalition that toppled Bashar al-Assad’s regime in December 2024 while heading the militant group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, has since recast himself as a pro-Western reformer. Legacy media outlets have described his government as “moderate” compared to Assad’s rule.
The visit marks the first time a Syrian head of state has entered the White House since Syria gained independence in 1946, NPR reported. Trump, during a speech in Saudi Arabia, said in May that he would lift U.S. sanctions on Syria.
From the Daily Caller News Foundation
By Emily Kopp
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s (ODNI) hub for foreign biological threats dismissed the intelligence pointing to a lab accident in Wuhan as “misinformation” in January 2021, two former government sources who requested anonymity to discuss sensitive internal meetings told the Daily Caller News Foundation. New documents show that intelligence risked implicating ODNI’s own bioengineering advisor — University of North Carolina professor Ralph Baric.
Baric, who engineered novel coronaviruses with the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), advised ODNI four times a year on biological threats, according to documents released Oct. 30 by Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul.
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Baric did not respond to the DCNF’s requests for comment.
The professor’s ties to American intelligence may run even deeper, the documents reveal, as ODNI facilitated a meeting between the CIA and Baric about a project on coronaviruses in September 2015.
The email exchange with the subject line “Request for Your Expertise” shows an unnamed government official with a CIA-affiliated email address pitching a “possible project” to Baric relating to “[c]oronavirus evolution and possible natural human adaptation.”
The new documents shed a bit of light on a question members of Congress have posed for years: Whether our own intelligence agencies knew more about the likelihood of a lab origin of COVID than they told the public.
“Director Ratcliffe has been on the forefront of this issue since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic and has been committed to transparency and accountability on this issue,” a CIA spokesperson said in a statement. “In January – as one of the Director’s first actions at Langley – CIA made public its assessment that a research-related origin of the COVID-19 pandemic is more likely than a natural origin. CIA will continue to evaluate any available credible new intelligence reporting as appropriate.”
Paul is seeking more documents from ODNI on potential ties between U.S. intelligence and the research in Wuhan as part of an ongoing investigation by the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs and has promised public hearings in the coming months.
Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Tulsi Gabbard disbanded the ODNI biological threats office earlier this year following questions from the DCNF about its suppression of COVID origins intelligence in August. Gabbard and a dedicated working group have also been quietly investigating the origins of COVID.
Protecting Their Own
Baric gave a presentation to the ODNI in January 2020 showing that he advised American intelligence that COVID may have emerged from a lab, the documents also indicate. Baric shared that the WIV had sequenced thousands of SARS-like coronaviruses, including strains capable of epidemics, the slides show.
Baric noted that the Wuhan lab does this work under low biosafety levels despite the ability of some of these viruses to infect and grow in human lung cells.
What Baric omitted: He had submitted a grant application in 2018 with intentions to conduct research to make coronaviruses with the same rare features seen in COVID while concealing the Wuhan lab’s low biosafety level, jotting in the margins of a draft of the grant application that Americans would “freak out” if they knew about the shoddy standards.
One year after Baric’s presentation, ODNI had hardened against the lab leak hypothesis.
When State Department officials pushed to declassify certain intelligence related to a plausible lab leak in January 2021, the ODNI expressed concerns that it would “call out actions that we ourselves are doing.”
Former ODNI National Counterproliferation and Biosecurity Center (NCBC) Director Kathryn Brinsfield, a medical doctor, also dismissed a January 2021 presentation by government officials about a plausible lab origin of COVID as “misinformation,” two sources told the DCNF. Her top aide Zach Bernstein, who possesses a master’s degree in security studies but no scientific credentials, also dismissed the presentation, according to three sources.
Gabbard disbanded NCBC in August following questions from the DCNF about its role in suppressing COVID origins intelligence.
But in the years preceding Gabbard’s takeover of the intelligence community’s central office, the ODNI’s public reports omitted any analysis of COVID’s viral genome. One intelligence agency filed a formal complaint about this glaring omission, the DCNF reported.
Scientists often received fierce pushback from former National Intelligence Council official Adrienne Keen, who helped steward former President Joe Biden’s 90-day review into COVID’s origins, an official told the DCNF. Paul’s request for records from ODNI includes a request for some of Keen’s communications.
Brinsfield and Keen did not respond to requests for comment.
Unanswered Questions
Despite the new disclosures, the precise nature of the CIA’s interest in Baric’s coronavirus work remains unknown. The documents do not include any further details about the work that the CIA and Baric may or may not have undertaken.
The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) funded the discovery of novel coronaviruses and shipped the samples to Wuhan through a 2009-2020 program called PREDICT, the DCNF reported in July. USAID sometimes acted as a CIA front before Trump dismantled it earlier this year — but no evidence exists that the CIA directed PREDICT.
An unnamed FBI special agent was in communication with Baric about responding to public requests for his research and emails with the Wuhan lab through the North Carolina Freedom of Information Act, according to a 2024 congressional letter, but details about the contact between the FBI and Baric also remain uncertain.
The CIA was slow to acknowledge that a lab was the pandemic’s most likely source, an assessment that the CIA made public more than five years after the pandemic emerged and well after the FBI and the Department of Energy.
In early 2020, when Trump’s Deputy National Security Advisor Matt Pottinger tasked CIA analysts to dig into the matter, they came up empty, according to a New York Times report. Instead, anonymous sources smeared Pottinger as having a “conspiratorial view” of the Chinese Communist Party.
Trump’s current CIA Director John Ratcliffe, who served as the DNI from May 2020 to January 2021, revealed in a 2023 Wall Street Journal op-ed that he had pushed for the declassification of COVID origins intelligence as the DNI but that he “faced constant opposition, particularly from Langley.”
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