>>23269241, >>23269758 ICYMI: CIA Director John Ratcliffe Declassifies Review of 2016 Intelligence Weaponization and Post-Election Intelligence Community Assessment/ Clapper/Clinton-Steele dossierPN
(U) Timeline Impact: The highly compressed timeline was atypical for a formal IC assessment, which ordinarily can take months to prepare, especially for assessments of such length, complexity, and political sensitivity. CIA’s primary
authors had less than a week to draft the assessment and less than two days to formally coordinate it with IC peers before it entered the formal review process at CIA on 20 December.
• (U) Multiple IC stakeholders said they felt “jammed” by the compressed timeline. Most got their first look at the hardcopy draft and underlying sensitive reporting just before or at the only in-person coordination meeting that was held on 19 December to conduct a line-byline review.
• (S//NF) Following the coordination meeting, (U) Compressing review of the draft by multiple stakeholders to just a handful of days during a holiday week also created numerous challenges.
This was further complicated by the need to conduct the review in hardcopy, with drafts having to be hand-carried between various IC offices and buildings. The pressing timeline and limitations of hardcopy review likely biased the overall review process to focus more on precision of language and sourcing rather than on more substantial, time-consuming edits to refine the overall
presentation of the draft—which, with the benefit of hindsight, might have improved the argumentation in some areas.
• (S//NF) One of CIA’s lead authors expressed surprise that the review process had resulted in so few changes, which was “unusual” for such a lengthy, complex, and high-profile assessment.
• (S//NF) The (U) Rushed Timeline Justified?
(U) ICD 203 stipulates that analysis be “independent of political consideration”
and “must not be distorted by, nor shaped for, advocacy of a particular audience, agenda, or policy viewpoint.” The election had concluded, and the ICA was essentially a post-mortem analysis. Therefore, the rushed timeline to publish both classified and unclassified versions before the presidential transition raised questions about a potential political motive behind the White House tasking and timeline.
• (U) Without a clear operational need for urgency, this accelerated process
created vulnerabilities and opened lines of inquiry about potential bias.
• (U) A more measured approach with expanded time for review and wider
input would have better adhered to standard intelligence tradecraft practices and potentially deflected questions about White House motivations.
page 2 attached.
Here's the 8 page CIA Assessment
Link below:
https://www.cia.gov/static/Tradecraft-Review-2016-ICA-on-Election-Interference-062625.pdf