In July, ODNI declassified and released 2017 HPSCI(Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence) Majority staff report regarding "Russia's Influence Campaign Targeting the 2016 US Presidential Election". Below is the link to ODNI press release:
... President Obama directed the creation of this January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment after President Trump defeated Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election, and it served as the basis for what was essentially a years-long coup against the duly elected President of the United States, subverting the will of the American people and attempting to delegitimize Donald Trump’s presidency. ...
The declassified 46-page report in PDF format can be downloaded via the link below:
I'm archiving its text to make it searchable here. This is part 16.
The Misrepresentation of the Dossier's Credibility Extended to White House Briefings on the ICA. The Director of FBI visited the White House on 8 February 2017, where he briefed on the dossier among other topics. The Director wrote a memo for the record immediately afterward in which he documented:
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The White House Chief of Staff asked why the dossier materials ended up in the ICA, given that they were "unproven", according to the Director's memo.(redacted)
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The Director wrote that he told the Chief of Staff, "analysts from all three agencies [FBI, CIA, NSA] agreed it was relevant and that portions of the material were "corroborated by other intelligence" ... and I thought it very important that it be included."(redacted)
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In describing the dossier sourcing, the Director wrote "I explained [to the Chief of Staff] that the primary source was credible" and "_much of it [the dossier] was consistent with and corroborative of other intelligence."(redacted)
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The Director further wrote that his motive for wanting the dossier included in the ICA was that "the incoming president [Trump] needed to know the rest of it was out there."redacted
The FBI Director's memo indicates that in briefing the White House, he largely stuck to the ICA depiction of the dossier, to include conveying false and misleading information, and omitting critical facts.
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Contrary to the FBI Director's statements to the White House, that analysts "from all three agencies agreed" that the dossier was relevant, CIA analysts and senior operations officers had only weeks earlier argued with FBI counterparts against the dossier being included in the ICA. DCIA had to order it included over the objections of those professionals. CIA officers said that NSA had no role in the decision to include the dossier, and that it was only pushed by FBI.(redacted)
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It was highly misleading to tell the White House that the dossier primary source - Christopher Steele - was credible, when his only credible information came from an unrelated criminal case years prior.
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Mr. Steele's credibility as a source was very much in doubt by February 2016, yet the FBI Director did not mention the multitude of red flags on the dossier to include that Steele was not a source after being fired for lying, no significant information had been corroborated except for that previously published in open source media, the political messaging company that produced it was hired by the DNC, and that Mr. Steele "was desperate that Donald Trump not become President."
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The FBI Director also failed to mention that only a couple of weeks earlier FBI agents met with Christopher Steele's principal source, and learned the source had no relevant access to Putin or the Russian government, that the information was fabricated or "hearsay upon hearsay" and that Mr. Steele had greatly exaggerated the credibility of the material and sources, according to notes taken by the agents conducting the interview.
The ICA also claimed that "some of the FBI source's reporting is consistent with the judgments" in the ICA, specifically citing the judgment that "Putin ordered the influence effort with the aim of defeating Secretary Clinton." As reported previously in this investigation report, the ICA was not able to correctly cite any classified intelligence demonstrating that Putin intended to help one candidate or the other win the election. In any case, that allegation had also been made by various media pundits, prior to the production of the dossier, and thus constituted regurgitated, rather than unique information.(redacted)
The ICA Made False or Misleading Claims About Adhering to Proper Analytic Tradecraft. In light of the documented cases of the ICA employing misleading source descriptions, exclusion of contrary evidence, misquoted reports, and failure to consider alternative analytic hypotheses, the ICA's pointed references to the importance of tradecraft fundamentals does not hold up to scrutiny (see box "Analytic Process").
What the ICA Says: Analytic Process
"The goal of intelligence analysis is to provide assessments to decision makers that are intellectually rigorous, objective. timely, and useful, and that adhere to tradecraft standards. These standards include describing sources (including their reliability and access to information), clearly expressing uncertainty, distinguishing between underlying information and analysts judgments and assumptions, exploring alternatives."
"A critical part of the analyst's task is to explain uncertainties associated with major judgments based on the quantity and quality of the source material, information gaps, and the complexity of the issue" [ICA p.1]