Around this time five years ago, the Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee, after more than three years of work examining Russia’s attack on the United States’ 2016 elections, released voluminous and devastating information about the results of its investigation. The report at one point literally described a “direct tie between senior Trump Campaign officials and the Russian intelligence services.”
Almost immediately thereafter, the panel’s chairman, then-Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, started talking about the committee’s findings in ways that suggested he hadn’t read his own report.
As a Washington Post analysis put it at the time, the Floridian — years before he’d become Donald Trump’s secretary of state — aligned himself “with the GOP’s and Trump’s long-held talking points on this, despite the new evidence.”
Something eerily similar is happening again.
The issue returned to the fore last week, with news from the CIA. Politico reported:
A CIA review released Wednesday is critical of how the agency arrived at the assessment that Russia sought to sway the 2016 election in favor of Donald Trump — but finds the overall conclusion was sound. The initial assessment, which has been condemned by Trump and his allies, was done too quickly and featured excessive involvement by intelligence agency leaders, according to the review commissioned by CIA Director John Ratcliffe. But the review did not call into question the conclusions of the assessment, finding that it exhibited ‘strong adherence to tradecraft standards’ and that its ‘analytic rigor exceeded that of most IC assessments.’
The New York Times had a related report that noted the CIA’s eight-page findings “did not dispute the conclusion that Russia favored the election of Donald J. Trump.”
That this review happened at all should be controversial. Nearly a decade ago, every U.S. intelligence agency agreed that Russia had targeted the U.S. political system with the goal of putting Trump in power. Those conclusions were later bolstered by Robert Mueller’s special counsel investigation and the Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee’s examination.
But earlier this year, Trump’s CIA chief nevertheless authorized yet another review, presumably in the hope of finding information that would tell the incumbent president what he wanted to hear. That didn’t happen: The CIA concluded that while the agency might’ve rushed the process in 2016, it found once again that the underlying conclusion was sound.
It was at this point when Ratcliffe, Trump’s handpicked CIA director, borrowed a page from Rubio’s 2020 playbook and wrote online about his own agency’s findings, “All the world can now see the truth: Brennan, Clapper and Comey manipulated intelligence and silenced career professionals — all to get Trump.”
But that’s not at all what the CIA actually found. Ratcliffe was pointing to conclusions that do not exist in reality. As Shane Harris wrote in The Atlantic:
Those are profound allegations of ethical misconduct and public deception, and they’re particularly serious coming from the CIA director, a historically apolitical office. But you will find scant evidence to support these claims in the report that Ratcliffe now brandishes like a smoking gun. … [I]t remains remarkable for a CIA director to accuse his predecessors of partisan malfeasance, citing as evidence a document, which he ordered be written, that does not actually say that.
In case anyone would benefit from a refresher: Ratcliffe, a former Republican congressman from Texas, served as the director of national intelligence in Trump’s first term, where he developed quite a reputation. In early October 2020, for example, The New York Times summarized Ratcliffe’s work by saying, “He has approved selective declassifications of intelligence that aim to score political points, left Democratic lawmakers out of briefings, accused congressional opponents of leaks, offered Republican operatives top spots in his headquarters and made public assertions that contradicted professional intelligence assessments.”
Ratcliffe also dismayed officials inside the CIA, the Times added, by releasing unverified intelligence as part of an apparent electoral scheme.
Around the same time, in an op-ed for the New York Times, John Sipher, a former CIA station chief, wrote, “It’s quite an accomplishment, but in only five months, [Ratcliffe] has already put himself in the running to be considered among the most destructive intelligence officials in U.S. history.” After leaving office, Ratcliffe took a job with the Heritage Foundation and contributed to the Project 2025 project. Trump and Senate Republicans then decided to make him the director of the CIA, where he’s apparently picked up where he left off in Trump’s first term. Why should the public care? A few reasons, actually. First, it’s a problem when the director of the CIA misleads the public for obviously political purposes, doing fresh harm to his faltering credibility. In the coming weeks, months and years, Ratcliffe might very well need to deliver important messages to the public about serious matters, and Americans will have no idea whether they can believe him or not. Second, this appears to be part of a larger effort to politicize the U.S. intelligence community, which carries its own set of dramatic risks. Let’s also not forget that the Justice Department has opened highly dubious criminal investigations into former CIA Director John Brennan and former FBI Director James Comey, at least in part because of a reported referral from Ratcliffe that was based on the review his office released last week. This outlandish effort to rewrite recent history, in other words, is more than exasperating; it’s also highly consequential.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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