Hoax on Hoax?

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.

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:

The current senior intelligence official described speaking, today, to one of the ICA’s authors, who reported, “She was not an author and certainly not the lead author.”

The second source, like the first, was somewhat hesitant on the question of involvement. “I don’t want to categorically say she had zero involvement whatsoever because she was a high enough senior person… I want to be careful because she’s probably on an email here or there.” But “she wasn’t the lead author” and “definitely wasn’t heavily involved.”

Miller meanwhile told CNN last week that she was just meeting with her “team,” and preparing to lawyer up if criminal investigations are pushed. “My team and I, just yesterday, had a few drinks and talked about that, and talked about what lawyers we’d be looking for, if that happens.”

What’s bizarre about the Miller story is the wealth of evidence that there was dissension within the actual group of report authors. John Brennan’s own book, Undaunted, describes overruling two of his own analysts not just on the question of the dossier, but the overall conclusion that Putin meddled to help Trump specifically. Here Brennan describes his dispute with NSA Admiral Michael Rogers on this question, as well as his own team:

Mike wasn’t the only one who questioned the confidence level on the judgment in the assessment related to Russia favoring Mr. Trump’s candidacy. Two senior managers in the CIA mission center responsible for Russia—one with extensive operational experience and the other with a strong analytic background—visited me in my office and said that they had the same view as Mike Rogers. After a long discussion, during which I came to the conclusion that the two officers had not read all the available intelligence, I said that I would not overturn the judgment of the CIA analysts who… had made the high-confidence judgment.

Both the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) report released by Gabbard and Ratcliffe’s note describe objections by the ICA authors. The HPSCI report appears to refer to the same “senior managers” referenced in Brennan’s book, noting two of the five authors went to the former CIA chief and said, “We don’t have direct information that Putin wanted to get Trump elected.”

Miller however seems to suggest the whole team was certain. “The director of national intelligence and the White House are lying, again… We definitely had the intel to show with high probability that the specific goal of the Russians was to get Trump elected.” She speaks repeatedly about having “verified” intelligence that led to this conclusion, but never specifies what this is.

Miller’s media tour hasn’t just contained ordinary denials. They’ve been deeply meandering, sometimes self-contradictory, and strangely short on details or exactitude for a former reported head of counterintelligence of the CIA. “I can’t remember exact dates,” she groans, when asked by Isikoff when she first got intelligence that Russians were seeking to influence the election in Trump’s favor. “It would have been in the December time frame…”

“December 16,” said Isikoff helpfully.

“Yeah, 16, or fif— or November…”

“No, sixteen,” Isikoff reminded her.

“Sixteen, I’m saying,” Miller agreed. “Or even November, or even earlier… the thing about these reports is we just put ‘em out and let people look at them… So it definitely was Decemberish, or, uh, November and December…”

Miller also gave multiple versions of her feelings about the Steele Dossier in that same interview, among other things saying she recalled it was to be included in the final Assessment with a “covering paragraph” that said its information had been included “at the FBI’s request” and “not looked at by any particular team or something to that effect.” (There’s no such paragraph in the ICA annex, which was declassified in 2020.) She told NBC, “We found no two-way collusion between Trump or his team with the Russians,” told CNN the team’s conclusions were “not at all” based on the Dossier, and told Isikoff in July she had “no idea” if the Steele reports were real. In May, she said something different:

I look back now at the Steele Dossier and I wonder, did we miss something? … Maybe. … Trump is acting, at a minimum, like a dictator, and he’s acting like Putin. And so that’s why I’m reserving my thoughts on that now until I can figure out if there’s any more information out there.

As Jerry Dunleavy at Just The News pointed out, Miller had to be reminded what the pee tape was in the Channel 4 documentary. “What’s pee tapes?” she asked. After an off-camera exchange, she then said, “Oh, the pee tapes! Now I know what you’re talking about. … Would they have bugged the room? 100%.”

One of the questions I sent to Miller was if she’d read the report on FISA abuse and the Trump-Russia investigation by Inspector General Michael Horowitz, which describes how the FBI attempted to trace the origins of Steele’s most famous claims. Horowitz learned one FBI team’s level of corroboration was “zero,” that many of the claims were “word of mouth and hearsay,” or “conversation… with friends over beers,” made in “jest,” and so on. The Miller giving these interviews appears not to have read this material.

“It’s totally shocking that in the Year of Our Lord, 2025, someone is still perpetuating the ‘Trump is a Russian asset’ idea, and also was a senior CIA person,” says the second source. “It’s concerning to me that that person never had a security clearance.”

Miller’s history of comments calling MAGA supporters “Nazis” and posting on LinkedIn that “Trump is in love with Russia” and so on seems like the sentiment of an ordinary media consumer, not someone who’s been read into the highest level of intelligence. Why this goofy person is front and center in the media rounds this week as opposed to Brennan or former DNI James Clapper or former FBI head James Comey is yet another quirky detail for future historians, one of whom will surely remark: this Russiagate thing was Ops all the way down.

https://www.racket.news/p/hoax-on-hoax-ex-cia-official-susan