by Greg Collard at Racket News
Notable problems with the “Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections” report. The ICA’s most salacious, oft-reported parts were a scam.
A key part of the House Permanent Selection Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) review is about then-CIA director John Brennan’s reliance on an obscure fragment to determine in the 2017 ICA that Putin “aspired to help Trump’s chances of victory when possible.”
The fragment, which is in bold below, comes from a raw human source intelligence report, or HUMINT in intelligence-speak.
“Putin had made this decision [to leak DNC emails) after he had come to believe t h a t 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.”
You might think that means Putin wanted Trump to win. That’s one interpretation.
But there were five different interpretations among the five people who wrote the ICA.
A senior CIA operations officers remarked:
“We don’t know what was meant by that,” and “five people read it five ways,” the HPSCI reports says.
Usually that’s no problem,…
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