Racket Library: The Declassified Intelligence Documents
Here the documents that have been released in the last month, along with a roundup of Racket's reporting
Matt Taibbi has had a slew of reporting in the last month about declassified documents related to Russiagate, so I thought it would be useful to have everything in one place — not just for our audience, but internally as well.
July 3, 2025
First up is a CIA report commissioned by CIA Director John Ratcliffe that focuses on the Intelligence Community Assessment of January 6, 2017. Matt writes about the CIA report here.
Among the findings: former CIA Director John Brennan was warned not to include the Steele Dossier in the ICA.
CIA’s Deputy Director for Analysis (DDA) warned in an email to Brennan on 29 December that including it in any form risked “the credibility of the entire paper.”
The new CIA report, dated June 26, criticizes the intelligence chiefs for including the Steele Dossier in the ICA, saying that “ran counter to fundamental tradecraft principles” and “undermined the credibility” of his key conclusions. That isn’t just an after the fact conclusion, however. As Matt notes in this story, it was already known that Brennan overruled NSA chief Mike Rogers and two senior CIA managers in Russia to reach the much-disputed conclusion that Putin “aspired” to help Donald Trump win the election. The CIA report elaborates:
The two senior leaders of the CIA mission center responsible for Russia argued jointly against including the “aspire” judgment. In an email to Brennan on 30 December, they stated the judgment should be removed because it was both weakly supported and unnecessary, given the strength and logic of the paper’s other findings on intent. They warned that including it would only “open up a line of very politicized inquiry.”
Below is the CIA report, called a “Note,” as well as the January 6, 2017, ICA.
July 9, 2026
Matt reports:
In a story first broken by Fox News, reported further by Margot Cleveland at The Federalist, Miranda Devine at the New York Post, and Paul Sperry at RealClear Investigations, and bolstered now by our own sources at Racket, it’s confirmed: FBI Director Kash Patel has opened criminal investigations into former CIA chief John Brennan and former FBI Director James Comey, for offenses related to the Trump-Russia scandal colloquially known as “Russiagate.”
Specifically, the FBI is looking at perjury and conspiracy against them related to how the CIA and FBI worked to produce the infamous ICA.
Matt also reports on an angry letter from House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) chair Rick Crawford sent to Trump about his disappointment in that the CIA was “permitted to whitewash” its June 26 report on the intelligence community’s role in Russiagate. He also said that his committee does not have a staff report that “documents efforts within the CIA to manufacture the Trump-Russia collusion narrative and must not be locked away indefinitely.”
Mr. President, CIA has in its possession a House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) staff report that exposes the truth about the politically driven Obama-era assessment that “Putin and the Russian Government developed a clear preference for President elect Trump.” The report was produced during the 116th Congress under the leadership of Devin Nunes despite extraordinary restrictions imposed by CIA. Among those restrictions are a prohibition on transporting the final document to our secure spaces on Capitol Hill. As a result, very few people have been able to review it.
July 10, 2025
Brennan goes on MSNBC, where he is a paid contributor, to address the investigation. Under the headline, “Brennan, MSNBC Can't Stop Lying About Trump and Russia,” Matt provides a breakdown of the interview with Nicole Wallace. Among Brennan’s complaints is that Ratcliffe did not speak to him. Matt writes:
Brennan’s unintentionally hilarious complaint is that John Ratcliffe didn’t bother interviewing him for the 8-page note released last week.
This is the same Brennan who included an explosive “annex” of classified material from ex-spy Christopher Steele that upended American politics for years without interviewing Steele, his “Primary Sub-Source” Igor Danchenko of the Brookings Institute, or any of the Russian sources who ostensibly provided the pillars of Steele’s reports: tales of Trump “employing a number of prostitutes to perform a ‘golden showers’ (urination) show,” the “well-developed conspiracy” between Trump and Russia, and the notion that “Russian authorities had been cultivating and supporting… Donald Trump, for at least five years.”
Wallace also interviews former Hillary Clinton attorney Marc Elias, who in 2016 was the point man in hiring Fusion-GPS, the research firm that hired Christopher Steele to compile reports on Trump. Matt writes:
Abandoning all self-respect, humorously hoping no one would remember his entire political raison d’être has been leveraging iffy information into legal trouble for antagonists, he said, “Like honestly, I’m just imploring the media, do NOT report” the news of the investigations. Priceless.
July 18-21, 2025
Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard releases a 114-page document, titled “Declassified evidence of Obama administration’s conspiracy to subvert Trump’s 2016 victory and presidency.”
Gabbard also releases an 11-page memorandum that provides a timeline and key portions from the declassified report.
The declassified report shows that intelligence officials on December 8, 2016, were preparing to release a report that concluded “Russian and criminal actors did not impact recent US election results by conducting malicious cyber activities against election infrastructure.”
From Matt’s July 18 story on the declassified report:
On the following day, December 9th, 2016, members of Obama’s National Security Principals Committee — including Clapper, CIA director John Brennan, Susan Rice, John Kerry, Brian McKeon, Loretta Lynch, Andrew McCabe, and Avril Haines — gathered for a meeting, after which each received an email titled, “POTUS Tasking on Russia Election Meddling.” The email tasked the members with the creation of a new “assessment per the President’s request.”
Matt follows up on July 19 in a story titled, “Barack Obama Now Squarely in Russiagate Crosshairs.” He writes:
It once seemed a lock that Obama would be remembered as the winsome hero of Shepard Fairey’s portrait, but Gabbard’s documents place him at the center of an unprecedented act of political sabotage, committed in his last Oval Office days as a humiliated lame-duck in the winter of 2016-2017.
Matt goes into more detail on July 21 in a piece headlined, “Explaining Russiagate: Why the December 9th, 2016 Meeting Mattered”
July 23, 2025
Gabbard releases a House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence report - the one Crawford complained was being at the CIA — shows that uncredible evidence was used to conclude in the 2017 ICA that Russian President Vladimir Putin wanted Trump to win and “aspired to help his chances of victory.” From Matt’s story, headlined, “In Brutal Document Release, The Russia Hoax is Finally Exposed”:
The Assessment was written by just five CIA analysts hand-picked by Brennan, but even these most favored lieutenants couldn’t accept the key pieces of evidence. Two of the five went to Brennan to say, “We don’t have direct information that Putin wanted to get Trump elected,” only to be overruled. The same thing happened when members of the group objected to the Steele material, saying it didn’t meet even “basic tradecraft standards.” When confronted on this point, Brennan reportedly said, “Yes, but doesn’t it ring true?”
In a companion piece, “Russiagate Explained: The Sins of the 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment,” Racket highlights other notable findings, including intelligence that was not used in the ICA.
July 30, 2025
Retired CIA officer Susan Miller, who said she was an author of the 2017 ICA and has made multiple media appearances defending it, was not an author of the report after all.
“Not an author. Not involved,” a senior intelligence official informed Matt in a story headlined, “Hoax on Hoax? Ex-CIA Official Susan Miller Was Not an Author of Key Intelligence Community Assessment, as Claimed.”
“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.”
Matt writes:
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.
July 30, 2025
Gabbard releases a document in which a whistleblower — a former deputy national intelligence officer at the National Intelligence Council — details how his objections to evidence used in the 2017 ICA were suppressed.
The whistleblower also says that the Steele Dossier was “supposedly inserted” by Comey during a car ride involving him, Brennan and James Clapper. As Matt notes in his story, “The jokes write themselves.”
July 31, 2025
Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley releases the annex to John Durham’s 2023 special counsel report. The Durham annex, dated May 12, 2023, was declassified at Grassley’s request. Matt writes:
It’s not the final word on this mess, but it establishes definitively that the public version of the Trump-Russia story, which officially began in July of 2016, was a thin tissue of fiction, concealing a larger and more sordid tale dating to at least January of 2016.
Nice to see Racket Library back!
Excellent work!