While the hotly anticipated IG ‘FISA’ report was perhaps the world’s loudest wrist-slap – resulting in just one criminal referral despite a mountain of evidence that the FBI’s top brass made serious errors while investigating the Trump campaign, The Federalist‘s Madeline Osburn points out that former CIA director John Brennan was just caught in a lie when he said they did not rely on the infamous Steele dossier for the Obama administration’s Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA).
The ICA report – thrown together over the course of a month, was used to inform President Barack Obama and then-President-elect Donald Trump in January, 2017 of Russian efforts to interfere in the 2016 US election.
And according to Monday’s FISA report, there was significant discussion on whether to include the Steele dossier in the main body of the ICA report – with former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe saying that “he felt strongly that the Steele election reporting belonged in the body of the ICA, because he feared that placing it in an appendix was ‘tacking it on’ in a way that would ‘minimiz[e]’ the information and prevent it from being properly considered.”
Ultimately, the ICA included a short summary and assessment of the dossier, which was incorporated in an appendix. “In the appendix, the intelligence agencies explained that there was ‘only limited corroboration of the source’s reporting’ and that Steele’s election reports were not used ‘to reach analytic conclusions of the CIA/FBI/NSA assessment,’” the IG report states. –The Federalist
Several months after the ICA report was released, on May 23, 2017, Brennan told the House Intelligence Committee that the CIA did not rely on the Steele dossier for the ICA report “in any way.” – READ MORE