John Brennan overruled CIA officers who disputed confidence in intelligence on Putin’s 2016 motivations
(Worthy News) – Former CIA Director John Brennan revealed he overruled two CIA officers who disagreed with him during the creation of the Intelligence Community Assessment of 2017 about his high level of confidence that Russian President Vladimir Putin interfered in 2016’s presidential election with the specific goal of helping elect then-candidate Donald Trump.
Brennan, who served as President Barack Obama’s CIA chief beginning in 2013 and has emerged as a harsh Trump critic since 2016, is slated to release his memoir, Undaunted: My Fight Against America’s Enemies At Home and Abroad, on Tuesday, and outlets that got a sneak peek reported there was internal CIA conflict over how confident the agency was over Russia’s true intentions in 2016.
Brennan “disagreed with the recommendation of two senior officers in early 2017 who wanted to override intelligence analysts’ determination that the agency had high confidence in one of its major judgments in the assessment of Russia’s 2016 election interference” — that Putin actively tried to help Trump and harm Clinton, according to the New York Times. After a “team of more than a dozen agency analysts made its initial draft assessment,” the report said, “two more senior officers in the mission center that oversaw intelligence on Russia expressed concerns to” Brennan and “the two officers, one an analyst and the other with a background in operations, suggested the confidence level be reduced to moderate.” Brennan “said he had been reviewing new intelligence about Russian interference since the summer of 2016 and was steeped in the material” and “he realized they may not have seen all of the material that he and the analysts who wrote the initial conclusion had reviewed.” Brennan justified his overruling of the two CIA officers by saying he was “not intervening for political reasons” and that “the quality of the sources justified the high confidence.” [ Source: Washington Examiner (Read More…) ]