Hoax on Hoax? Ex-CIA Official Susan Miller Was Not an Author of Key Intelligence Community Assessment, as Claimed

A former CIA official is suddenly making the rounds everywhere on national media to call Tulsi Gabbard and other officials liars, claims that proved ironic

The International Spy Museum will grant the “Hidden Hero Award” to former CIA officer Susan Miller this November

In response to last week’s damning official document release about a now-infamous intelligence document that helped launch years of Russiagate madness, CNN wrote:

Retired CIA official Susan Miller, an author of the agency’s 2017 intelligence report on Russian election meddling…

No, she’s not.

“Not an author. Not involved,” says a senior intelligence official.

“There’s a chance she’s on some emails or something like that,” adds another person familiar with the investigation. “But she’s not the author of the ICA… she wasn’t leading this effort. So it’s just totally bizarre that she claims the opposite.”

As if Russiagate weren’t a weird enough story already, the sudden appearance of mysterious former CIA officer Susan Miller in a high-profile media campaign reduces the affair to a freak show. In a story about one of the most elaborate media frauds in history, in which the CIA used phony intelligence to prop up a rushed report insisting Russian President Vladimir Putin meddled in the 2016 election on behalf of Donald Trump, it’s only fitting that the person leading the media defense of the original intelligence is not an author of the report in question and may not be significantly involved at all.

In a detail Jonathan Swift might have written, Miller is set to receive the Hidden Hero Award in November from the International Spy Museum in Washington, given to the official who makes “outsized contributions to the intelligence community.” Racket made multiple attempts to ask Miller about her role with the ICA. She did not respond.

However, we were about to go to press when Joe MacKinnon of Blaze media excellently beat us to the punch on this story. MacKinnon received an amusing two-part response from Miller. First:

My team and I at CIA wrote a CIA analysis about Russian influence on the election.

Second:

This was a CIA report, briefed to Trump by our then-director, and by me to the Senate and congressional intelligence committees. The DNI used that report as the basis for the ICA… I indeed did not write the ICA, but the ODNI used my report as the basis for theirs.

That’s not even a non-denial denial. It’s an oops.

The madness started a month ago, when current CIA Director John Ratcliffe released an eight-page Tradecraft Review outlining “multiple procedural anomalies” in the January 6, 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment that concluded Putin “aspired” to help Trump after developing a “clear preference” for him. Among other things, Ratcliffe found former Director John Brennan overrode his former Deputy Director of Analysis (DDA) and “the ICA authors” when he included intelligence from the Steele Dossier in the report, quoting an email from the DDA saying the Steele material imperiled “the credibility of the entire paper.”

Weeks after Ratcliffe’s report, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard issued a pair of document releases, first showing that Barack Obama in an abrupt shift personally ordered the new Assessment on December 9th, 2016, and secondly showing the key evidence for the “aspired” and “clear preference” claims were based on discarded, unverified, and fraudulent evidence.

After each of these events, Miller appeared to issue strident objections, saying Gabbard and the White House are “lying,” saying Trump is “acting like” a Russian asset, even doubling and tripling down on the Steele Dossier. Particularly lately, she’s seemingly been everywhere, headling a new NBC story, sitting at the center of a new Guardian feature, talking to CNN’s Kaitlan Collins on “The Source,” name-checked in a debate between Kristen Welker and Senator Lindsay Graham, sandwiched between Jeff Stein and old friend Michael Isikoff on multiple episodes of the SpyTalk podcast, saying Donald Trump is “acting like” a Russian asset in a Times UK radio segment, even speaking in a British Channel 4 documentary whose makers claim it’s “her first television interview addressing these events.”

The crucial first detail about these appearances is that Miller is introduced in virtually every one as a “principal author,” “author,” or team leader of the ICA. This is from an appearance on SpyTalk on July 18th with Isikoff, whom Racket readers remember was the reporter who wrote the first high-profile article sourced to British ex-spy Christopher Steele in September 2016:

ISIKOFF: And Brennan tapped you to oversee the task force, to author the report?

MILLER: Yes.

She says in that same podcast, “I headed up the report team”; On Meet The Press Kristen Welker described Miller as “a former senior CIA officer who helped to oversee the 2017 intelligence assessment on Russian interference”; another NBC story quoted her as saying she “she put together a team” that wrote the report; over and over, media characterizations put her at the center of the controversial report.

Now, we know it’s not true. At most, Miller helped author an unspecified report that was folded into the ICA. This is interesting given the many complaints that Gabbard’s report was a “conflation” confusing “apples and oranges.”

Exasperated sources had much to say: