How Intelligence Community Analysis Rules Were Flagrantly Violated in the Fraudulent Russia Collusion Assessment
The 2017 Russia ICA wasn’t intelligence — it was political sabotage, rushed and rigged to smear Trump before he even took office, the House report now reveals.
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NOTE: My friend Fred Fleitz is a former Trump National Security Council Chief of Staff, a former CIA analyst, and a former senior staffer with the House Intelligence Committee. He knows this topic better than most. — RDM
by Fred Fleitz
August 9, 2025
A bombshell House Intelligence Committee (HPSCI) Majority Staff Report recently released by Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Tulsi Gabbard explains in detail how the rules for drafting intelligence assessments were deliberately ignored to produce a highly politicized Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) in early January 2017, designed to sabotage the first Trump administration.
Worried about the House report’s clarity and persuasiveness, former Obama officials, former intelligence officials, congressional Democrats, and liberal journalists are desperately trying to discredit this report.
President Obama ordered the ICA, titled “Russia’s Influence Campaign Targeting the 2016 Presidential Election,” during a December 9, 2016, meeting with DNI James Clapper, CIA Director John Brennan, National Security Adviser Susan Rice, Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe, and others. The ICA was issued less than a month later, on January 6, 2017.
Because ICAs are high-profile analyses of significant national security issues that are supposed to reflect the views of all 17 U.S. intelligence agencies, they usually take many months – often over a year – to complete. For this reason, the speed with which this ICA was issued sparked immediate controversy.
The Intelligence Community’s tradecraft standards are guidelines taught to all U.S. intelligence analysts to ensure that their analysis reflects analytic rigor and excellence. The House report explains how these standards were set aside to produce this assessment in less than a month and ensure that it had one preordained conclusion: that Russian President Vladimir Putin wanted Trump to win the 2016 election and that Russia meddled in the election to help Trump win.
Which Intelligence Analysis Rules Were Broken?
The House report found significant violations of the following intelligence tradecraft standards: