Tulsi Gabbard and John Ratcliffe Reveal Putin “Was Counting on” a Trump Win

It’s funny, reading the two rehashes of the 2017 ICA that John Ratcliffe and Tulsi Gabbard released in the last weeks.

There are parallels and common judgments between them (probably in part because the CIA one was limited to “CIA materials provided to congressional oversight investigations”). Both say the confidence level for the judgment that Putin “aspired” to help then-candidate Donald Trump win the election was too high. Both say John Brennan big-footed the process in a problematic way. Both complain about the short timeline. Both complain that “the highest classified version of the ICA had been shared with more than 200 US officials;” neither acknowledge that that was neither anticipated nor, presumably, the fault of Obama appointees, who were long-gone by the time Trump’s appointees disseminated it that broadly (and in fact other documents Tulsi released suggest that ICA drafters intentionally planned a less-classified version to be disseminated at that level, to avoid the problem Trump’s appointees complain about). Both complain about how the Steele dossier was added as an appendix, though (as I’ll show in a follow-up) they’re inconsistent about how they claim it was.

But there are differences. the document from Ratcliffe — who released the first of the SRV documents contemporaneously with the HPSCI report that obsessed about them — doesn’t appear to mention them at all.

The two reports treat three pieces of intelligence on which the “aspired” judgment was based differently (the CIA one may not treat one of the HPSCI complaints at all). As I’ll note in my main post on the HPSCI report, CIA treats one document that HPSCI considers problematic as reliable but compartmented in a way that made inclusion problematic.

Perhaps the most interesting detail you get from reading both in tandem pertains to one phrase in a document about which “a senior CIA operations officer observed, ‘We don’t know what was meant by that’ and ‘five people read it five ways,'” basically, about whether that phrase hade been read the correct way. As of a few weeks ago, in Ratcliffe’s report, the CIA was still trying to protect this intelligence, but not Tulsi. She declassified most of four pages of discussion about the phrase, with information about the access — the source was well-established, had authoritative access to something but second-hand access to this information, but for some reason the CIA was not able to clarify what the source meant by the phrase. The HPSCI Report complains that the ICA didn’t note that this person had an “anti-Trump bias” (emphasis original).

And Tulsi declassified what the intelligence said (even though she hadn’t in the less classified version of the ICA she had released a day earlier).

Putin had made this decision [to leak DNC emails in July] after he had come to believe that the Democratic nominee had better odds of winning the U.S. presidential election, and that [Trump], whose victory Putin was counting on, most likely would not be able to pull off a convincing victory.

The HPSCI memo goes on to complain that Brennan included this. It invents a number of other readings this could have meant, besides that Putin wanted to help Trump win. Maybe Putin expected Trump to win, in July 2016 when no one else did? Maybe Putin counted on a Trump win at the RNC? They even tried to undermine the intelligence by claiming that all the things Putin did to tamper in the election could have served the other goals he also had.

None of the confirmed activities — leaks, public statements, social media messaging, and traditional propaganda — corroborate the ICA interpretation of the fragment, because these activities were all consistent with Putin’s objectives to undermine faith in US democracy, without regard for candidate Trump’s fate.

Putin approved the DNC leak because he was counting on Trump to win, the fragment said, and HPSCI Republicans want to believe that maybe Putin just wanted to undermine faith in democracy.

Well, anyway, as I said, Ratcliffe didn’t declassify any of that. He did send analysts back to review the underlying intelligence, and here’s what they said.

The DA Review examined the underlying raw intelligence and confirmed that the clause was accurately represented in the serialized report, and that the ICA authors’ interpretation of its meaning was most consistent with the raw intelligence.

And Ratcliffe also backs the quality of the source behind this claim.

The DA Review does not dispute the quality and credibility of the highly classified CIA serialized report that the ICA authors relied on to drive the “aspired” judgment.

So between them, Tulsi and Ratcliffe provided us something genuinely new. According to a reliable but ambiguous intelligence fragment, CIA got intelligence that said Putin approved the DNC leak  “because he was counting on” Trump’s victory.

Update: I’ve fixed the quotation mark in the title: just the “counting on” is a direct quote.