Trump’s CIA Director John Ratcliffe Is Covering-Up for Barack Obama.
27 July 2025, by Eric Zuesse. (All of my recent articles can be seen here.)
The full source for this is the retired CIA analyst, and the best-informed of all reporters on the CIA from the inside (and on U.S. geostrategy), the always truthful and deeply insightful Larry C. Johnson. Afterward, I shall here report key excerpts from an until-now secret U.S. House investigation into Russiagate, which documents what Johnson is saying.
On July 26th, Johnson was interviewed by another of the best reprters on these matters, the retired Lt. Col. Daniel Davis:
“FAKE INTELLIGENCE: The true story behind the Declassified Documents w/Larry Johnson”
At 14:21 there, Johnson says “Why the hell wasn’t this stuff released during Donald Trump’s first term?”:
It would have proven what was going on. you know, they didn't just suddenly find these
14:31
documents, but right. DAVIS: And here's a question I've got, too. Do do you have any idea why that
14:37
wasn't the case and why, like the Senate, the three-year Senate Intel uh group that that took a look at that,
14:42
etc., the CIA looked at its own stuff. Uh because on July 2nd, they reported the New York Times reported about the
14:49
current CIA director [Ratcliffe] saying that, well, we look back at that stuff and it was largely correct. Uh
14:55
I mean, why would he said that? JOHNSON: That is so much crap. I mean, it really, it's
15:01
they [he is talking here of the institution, the Deep State, which includes the CIA] they’re covering their own ass. Both the the intelligence community, the
15:07
CIA in particular, Ratcliffe in particular. Ratcliffe when he was director of national intelligence under
15:14
Donald Trump, he had this information.
…
the documents that Tulsi is releasing now show that there was direct intervention both at at the direction of
36:54
Obama from the White House and then with Clapper and Brennan interfering and
36:59
directly inserting themselves into the clearance process overruling analysts.
37:04
Now, it's one thing to, when you when you're uh if you got a factual basis and
37:11
get overruled by a director of CIA, you know, that's a problem. And that's
37:16
exactly what Brennan did. It's another thing that say, well, this is just our opinion. Uh that this wasn't based on
37:24
opinion. They said, we don't have any evidence to support that claim.
37:30
…
DAVIS: I want to show you something from John Kiriakou who's also a former uh CIA uh
38:02
officer uh who we've had on the show in the last month or so, but he was on the PBD broadcast uh and made an interesting
38:10
comment about uh Brennan himself.
38:20
John's the guy. John says, "I want to be CIA director." The liberals went crazy.
38:25
They said absolutely not. He was the one of the godfathers of the torture program. Obama says, "Okay, I'm going to
38:31
make him deputy director of the National Security Council, deputy national security adviser for counterterrorism."
38:37
Then he started doing the kill list. Well, by 2012, the liberals forgot or
38:43
didn't care or whatever, were distracted. They make him CIA director and then he starts just wreaking
38:49
vengeance on all of his enemies. Wow. This is a bad guy.
38:55
John Brennan is a very bad guy. From day one, he was a bad guy.”
39:00
…
So they knew they knew Seth Rich was in touch with Julian Assange. They knew how the whole thing had happened. They have
47:02
the intelligence documents. It's there. Just a simple matter of declassifying them.
47:10
And okay, so now the the whole issue here uh that that uh director Gabbard's
47:16
raising is that this was a an Obama driven attempt to unseat Trump. DAVIS: So now how do
47:24
you take how do you go from where those things are with the steel dossier, with the DNC stuff, and you know the Russia
47:30
gate etc., to getting him out of power because you mentioned the the impeachments uh that the the first
47:36
impeachment was primarily over whether or not he used uh Ukraine to to try and
47:41
gain uh get a quote quid pro quo etc. How do those things tie together? JOHNSON: Well, the
47:49
the reason I think she's saying that Obama directed this is because of that
47:54
meeting that took place in early December after um uh Trump won
48:02
that everybody was caught completely unawares that nobody expected Trump to win. Uh it
48:09
was that so when when Obama calls those people into that meeting and basically
48:16
says okay I want, we need to, we need to produce an assessment showing
48:21
that uh Donald Trump that the Russians pulled this off for Donald Trump. It was
48:26
all done for the purpose of discrediting [the next U.S. President, setting him up to be impeached and removed from office]. Look at the subsequent actions that Obama took. They
48:32
started collecting, they were monitoring Mike Flynn's phone calls. So they took
48:39
the information about what he said to the Russians. They they imposed sanctions immediately
48:46
on Russia, kicked out a bunch of diplomats, seized property.
48:52
All of this was creating this narrative that Russia had interfered when the
48:58
intelligence, actual intelligence showed the exact opposite, that they had not
49:05
interfered. I mean, for God's sake, when you look at the amount of interference that we do as a country in other
49:11
elections overseas, my god, the Russians would have to go to
49:16
school on us. you know, the the the US method for starting a color revolution.
49:22
——
Among the documents that Gabbard released on 22 July 2025 was the till-now-hidden House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) 18 September 2020 “Oversight Investigation & Referral, The Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA): ‘Russia's Influence Campaign Targeting the 2016 US Presidential Election’” which found that:
In contrast to the rest of the ICA, the judgment that Putin developed "a clear preference" for candidate Trump and "aspired to help his chances of victory" did not adhere to the tenets of the ICD, Analytic Standards. … The sections addressing Putin's intentions for influencing the US election did not observe professional criteria set forth in ICD 203, Analytic Standards. …
The ICA ignored or selectively quoted reliable intelligence reports that challenged — and in some cases undermined — judgments that Putin sought to elect Trump. …
DCIA [John Brennan] picked five CIA analysts to write the ICA [Intelligence Community Assessment that was suposed to represent the consensus view of all 17 U.S. intelligence agencies], and rushed its production in order to publish two weeks before President-elect Trump was sworn-in. …
Unlike routine IC [Intelligence Community] analysis, the ICA [Intelligence Community Assessment that Obama received and on the basis of which he launched the Russiagate hoax] was a high-profile product ordered by the President, directed by senior IC agency heads, and created by just five CIA analysts, using one principal drafter. Production of the ICA was subject to unusual directives from the President and senior political appointees, and particularly DCIA. The draft was not properly coordinated within CIA or the IC, ensuring it would be published without significant challenges to its conclusions. …
One scant, unclear, and unverifiable fragment of a sentence from a single HUMINT report — published under DCIA Brennan's December 2016 order — constitutes the only classifled information cited by the ICA for the judgment that Putin "aspired to help Trump's chances of victory when possible.” …
Despite unknown sourcing, reliable contrary evidence, and implausible claims, the then Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, responding to a request to double check the sourcing behind the judgment, responded in a letter to the Committee that he nonetheless [still] endorsed the ICA judgment. …
The ICA judgment on Putin's thoughts about helping candidate Trump does not stand if the single interpretation of the [key] fragment is wrong, because there is no other intelligence corroborating it, and in any case, viable — perhaps more likely — alternative interpretations of the fragment exist. …
DCIA overruled CIA professionals to publish and cite the ambiguous fragment. …
DCIA ordered the publication of reports which failed to meet CIA criteria for reliability and clarity, that subsequently became key ICA citations on Putin’s intentions. …
The ICA text failed to acknowledge the ambiguity and uncertain origin of the fragment. …
The ICA mischaracterized the fragment as supporting “high confidence” judgments. …
DCIA ordered the publication of a second substandard report, from an unknown subsource, cited by the ICA to allege that Putin preferred Trump. This information was both unverified and implausible. …
DCIA ordered the publication of a third substandard report — also from an unknown subsource — that was cited to imply Putin’s preference for Trump. …
The ICA falsely claimed the third substandard report was corroborated by a body of other reporting .…
The ICA excluded significant intelligence that contradicted its judgments that Putin aspired to help Trump win. …
The ICA selectively excluded information from reliable intelligence sources that senior Russian officials had serious reservation about how a potential Trump administration could be bad for Moscow and complicate repairing relations with Washington. …
Voluminous and likely relevant evidence was excluded from consideration. …
These failures were serious enough to call into question judgments that allege Putin "developed a clear preference for candidate Trump" and "aspired to help his chances of victory" and that "Russian leaders never entirely abandoned hope for a defeat of Secretary Clinton.” …
Documents leaked [regardless by whom] during the election were far less damaging to Secretary Clinton than those Putin chose not to leak. …
The ICA also misrepresented the unsourced Steele Dossier as intelligence, … that was produced on behalf of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and the Clinton campaign, … little more than a regurgitation of stories previously published by multiple media outlets. … Even a cursory examination of the dossier documents revealed that the only significant verifiable information had come from media stories. … The dossier was not accidently "acquired" by probing journalists, as the ICA suggests. It is not clear why the ICA covered-up that the dossier was deliberately fed to the media by the FBI former source, Mr. Steele, as political messaging on behalf of the Clinton campaign and DNC. …
The ICA claimed that "some" of the source's information "has been corroborated in the past" but failed to clarify that no significant 2016 information from Mr. Steele on Putin's covert action operations — the topic of the ICA — had ever been corroborated. …
Mr. Steele refused to be interviewed for this investigation. …
The misrepresentation of the dossier's credibility extended to White House briefings on the ICA.
Despite the ICA's significant tradecraft failures, the assessment demonstrated awareness of the ICD standards. [So, they knew what they were doing.] …
Back on 18 December 2028, Larry Johnson headlined an article, “The Trump Coup Is a Threat to Our Republic”, and, though it was actually a coup by Obama to cripple the Presidency of the incoming President Trump, and so its headline was wrong, it is otherwise as valid and informative an article today as it was then — especially because it received almost no public attention at the time, and is thus news even today.
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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s latest book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.
"Back on 18 December 2028"
Pls clarify?