CIA Director John Ratcliffe said Friday that he was directing the agency to retract or substantively edit 19 intelligence reports that President Donald Trump’s political appointees said failed to meet “tradecraft standards” or contained political bias.
Ratcliffe, a Trump appointee, said the reports “fall short of the high standards of impartiality that CIA must uphold and do not reflect the expertise for which our analysts are renowned,” adding that “there is absolutely no room for bias in our work.”
The agency did not identify all 19 reports, but listed three that were released during the administrations of Trump’s recent Democratic predecessors.
Two of the reports, “Women Advancing White Racially and Ethnically Motivated Violent Extremist Radicalization and Recruitment” and “Worldwide: Pandemic-Related Contraceptive Shortfalls Threaten Economic Development,” were released under the Biden administration.
The third, “Middle East-North Africa: LGBT Activists Under Pressure,” was released while Barack Obama was president.
In a press release, the agency said that the retractions and revisions are meant to meet “the President’s expectations that CIA’s workforce remains independent from a particular audience, agenda, or policy viewpoint.”
The agency said the 19 reports were identified by the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board (PIAB) after an independent review of 10 years of reports.
Trump’s appointees to the PIAB include political allies like former GOP Reps. Devin Nunes and Brad Wenstrup, former Republican National Committee Chair Reince Priebus and Katie Miller, a former DOGE adviser and the wife of top presidential adviser Stephen Miller.
In a statement Friday, Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, who serves as the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, called the retractions “politicization” of intelligence work and criticized the PIAB.
“The President’s Intelligence Advisory Board plays an important advisory role, but it is not a substitute for the independent analytic judgment of the CIA and the broader Intelligence Community,” Warner said.
“When political appointees appear to dictate what analysis is valid, it threatens the credibility, reliability, and independence of the Intelligence Community itself,” he added.
Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, praised the PIAB’s advice in a post on X.
“The Obama and Biden administrations mixed intelligence analysis and politics far too often. I commend Director Ratcliffe for correcting the record and ensuring that the CIA’s analysis is free of any political bias,” Cotton wrote.
