By Brett Forrest

A CIA report declassified on Wednesday weakened an earlier determination that Russian President Vladimir Putin had "aspired" to help elect Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election, supporting President Trump's longstanding claim that the Kremlin played no role in his victory.

The internal review, ordered by Central Intelligence Agency director John Ratcliffe in May and completed last week, investigated the creation of a highly classified December 2016 intelligence-community assessment of Russia's influence campaign targeting that year's presidential election.

The review determined that the intelligence assessment should not have placed "high confidence" in its evaluation of Putin's aims.

"Agency heads at the time created a politically charged environment that triggered an atypical analytic process around an issue essential to our democracy," Ratcliffe said in a statement.

The 2016 assessment and subsequent reports across the intelligence community appeared to impugn the legitimacy of Trump's victory, stoking his ire and distrust of U.S. intelligence agencies.

At a 2018 summit with the Russian leader in Helsinki, Trump told reporters asking about the Kremlin's election meddling that "President Putin says it's not Russia. I don't see any reason why it would be."

The review released Wednesday didn't dispute the credibility of the highly classified CIA report collected in July 2016 that served as the basis for the intelligence community's conclusion about Putin's intentions. The review stated, however, that the 2016 assessment didn't merit the "high confidence" it received because it was single-sourced.

The review also cited dissent over the assessment, including the National Security Agency's discomfort with the "high confidence" label and a recommendation from the leaders of the CIA's Russia mission center to exclude the "aspire" judgment from the ultimate report.

A former senior CIA official who worked on the 2016 assessment disputed the contents of the declassified review, saying that the CIA was under Congressional pressure to produce an assessment quickly but that there were no procedural anomalies, as the review alleged. The CIA group that developed the report based it on operations intelligence of Russia's influence campaign, the former official said.

Reviews of the CIA's work on high-profile subject matter are routine and sometimes used as case studies at the Sherman Kent School for Intelligence Analysis , a CIA training school. Yet complete CIA intelligence documents are rarely declassified, usually only in response to congressional inquiries. The review declassified Wednesday was partially redacted.

A former senior intelligence official said that declassifying an internal review of this sort is highly irregular.

Intelligence officials including Ratcliffe and national intelligence director Tulsi Gabbard have pledged to deliver intelligence without political influence, yet the administration has faced accusations that it is using intelligence for political ends.

Earlier this year, Gabbard removed the acting chair and deputy at the National Intelligence Council, the top U.S. intelligence analysis board, after it released an assessment contradicting Trump's assertion that the Venezuelan government was directing the Tren de Aragua criminal gang to invade the U.S.

Ratcliffe said he was committed to ensuring that the CIA's analysts "have the ability to deliver unvarnished assessments that are free from political influence."

The review declassified Wednesday described anomalies in the preparation of the 2016 assessment that it said had resulted in a higher confidence level than was justified. It cited factors including a compressed production timeline, excess involvement from agency heads, uneven access to information, a shortage of internal debate and review and the marginalization of the National Intelligence Council.

The CIA review stated that the overall 2016 assessment was defensible, however, while agreeing with its additional conclusions that Russia sought to undermine confidence in the election and denigrate the candidacy of Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee and Trump's opponent.

Write to Brett Forrest at brett.forrest@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

July 02, 2025 19:08 ET (23:08 GMT)

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