A key part of the House Permanent Selection Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) review is about then-CIA director John Brennan’s reliance on an obscure fragment to determine in the 2017 ICA that Putin “aspired to help Trump’s chances of victory when possible.”
The fragment, which is in bold below, comes from a raw human source intelligence report, or HUMINT in intelligence-speak.
“Putin had made this decision [to leak DNC emails) after he had come to believe t h a t the Democratic nominee had better odds of winning the U.S. presidential election, and that [candidate Trump], whose victory Putin was counting on, most likely would not be able to pull off a convincing victory.”
You might think that means Putin wanted Trump to win. That’s one interpretation.
But there were five different interpretations among the five people who wrote the ICA.
A senior CIA operations officers remarked: “We don’t know what was meant by that,” and “five people read it five ways,” the HPSCI reports says.
Usually that’s no problem, because as the Intelligence Community Directive standards (ICD 203) make clear, alternative interpretations should be included. Incredibly, the ICA failed to do that even though there was great disagreement on the fragment’s meaning.
The significance of this fragment to the ICA case that Putin “aspired” for candidate Trump to win cannot be overstated. The major “high confidence” judgment of the ICA rests on one opinion about a text fragment with uncertain meaning, that may be a garble, and for which it is not clear how it was obtained. This text-which would not have been published without DCIA’s orders to do so—is cited using only one interpretation of its meaning and without considering alternative interpretations.
The HPSCI gives some examples of alternative interpretations for “whose victory Putin was counting on.” Since the information was acquired in July 2016, it could have meant Putin “expected” a Trump victory at the upcoming Republican National Convention. The HPSCI notes that the convention’s outcome “was still uncertain to do active efforts to deny Trump a majority of convention delegates. This was a headline issue for the US political media at the time, though many pundits nonetheless expected — or ‘counted on’ — a Trump victory.”
Hellbound and Down 