Mid-Level ICA Declassified (Part 1)

Today, DNI under Tulsi Gabbard declassified some of the reports around the 2016/17 ICA report, along with the “mid-level” intelligence community assessment. Her actions lack some credibility, particularly because the release was done as “Evidence of Obama Administration Conspiracy to Subvert President Trump’s 2016 Victory.”

The highly classified version of the ICA is still classified, and we’d love to read it, along with HPSCI’s report.

Still, there is some important information from today.

First thing to address for those who read the files, it’s important to distinguish between alleged hacks of election infrastructure from the “influence” campaign. It was ultimately found that hacks of state election boards did not result in vote count alteration, and we’ve heard relatively little on that in the last several years.

The timeline document compiled and released takes an odd approach in highlighting sections of the ICA relating to hacks of election infrastructure:

By highlighting this, Gabbard seems to be pushing a narrative that the intelligence community knew Russia wasn’t trying to interfere. That is not true and it’s misleading.

One of the most important parts of the September ICA report contained in the released files is here:

Low confidence.

A few weeks later on October 7, 2016, the US government issued a joint-attribution statement stating that Russia was behind the hacks. They were still requesting data and server images from Crowdstrike and the DNC through October 13th.

So what changed? What did they rely on? That is the question that is driving much of our work around the Antonakakis-Dagon attribution report from August 7, 2016, which was sent to a DARPA official named Angelos Keromytis, who appears to have forwarded that report on and culminated in an October 7 meeting at the Obama White House:

But I digress.

On December 9, 2016, the Obama White House held a meeting to discuss Obama’s instruction to perform a new Intelligence Community Assessment, with only weeks left in Obama’s term. That same night, the Washington Post falsely stated the CIA had concluded in an assessment that Russia had intervened. In other words, someone was leaking and helping to craft a narrative about assessments that didn’t exist. This was followed by another leak and false report on December 14, 2016.

There is an apparent ODNI whistleblower who was involved in the September ICA, and the report tells us that whistleblower was sidelined and removed from emails on the new ICA:

By January 6, 2017, the new ICA was done. It was developed based on additional information obtained since the election, which is confirmed to be the Steele dossier:

The newly released mid-level ICA begins on page 81 of the released files.

In the early pages, those familiar with Steele’s reporting can observe the influence on the ICA. Some of the ICA paragraphs could have been written by Steele himself.

In part two we will go through the exercise of tying the ICA paragraphs back to Steele’s report.