Ex-CIA director pushed 'implausible' intel linking Putin to Donald Trump's election: Report

The United States' House Intelligence Committee had found that the country's intelligence community didn't have any direct information that Vladimir Putin wanted to help Donald Trump get elected as the presidentin 2016. However, the panel concluded that a "potentially biased" or implausible" report had been published at the insistence of then-President Barack Obama.

The content of the 2020 classified report was published by Fox News on Wednesday. It said the report was stored in a limited-access vault at CIA Headquarters. The committee focused on the creation of the Intelligence Community Assessment of 2017, in which then-CIA Director John Brennan pushed for the inclusion of the now-discredited anti-Trump dossier. It claimed he knew that it was based on what the channel described as "internet rumour".

The report said that the ICA was a "product" ordered by the President and created by just five CIA analysts. Only one principal drafter was used. It was directed by senior IC agency heads, the report adds.

"The draft was not properly coordinated within the CIA or the IC, ensuring it would be published without significant challenges to its conclusions," Fox quoted the report as saying.

The CIA analysts and the drafter rushed to get the report published two weeks before Donald Trump was sworn in as the President of the United States for the first time.

The report accused Brenna of ordering post-election publication of 15 reports containing previously collected but unpublished intelligence, three of which were "substandard". It said the former CIA chief got reports published that were “unclear, of uncertain origin, potentially biased, or implausible—and those became foundational sources for the ICA judgements that Putin preferred Trump over Clinton.”

The panel found that ICA didn't mention "underlying flaws" and misrepresented these reports as reliable.

"One scant, unclear, and unverifiable fragment of a sentence from one of the substandard reports constitutes the only classified information cited to suggest Putin ‘aspired’ to help Trump win," the report states, according to Fox.

The panel found that two senior CIA officers had warned Brennan that the agency didn'thave direct information linking Putin with Trump's election. However, despite this, the Obama administration went ahead with the report.