CIA Director John Ratcliffe has ordered the retraction or substantive revision of 19 intelligence assessments produced over the past decade, after a review found they were politically biased and failed to meet the agency's own analytic standards.
The assessments were first flagged by the President's Intelligence Advisory Board following an independent review of hundreds of reports from the last decade. An internal CIA review led by Deputy Director Michael Ellis confirmed the findings, concluding that the flagged products did not meet the standards that the American people expect from the CIA's elite analytic workforce.
Ratcliffe did not mince words about what the review uncovered:
"The intelligence products we released to the American people today, produced before my tenure as DCIA, fall short of the high standards of impartiality that CIA must uphold and do not reflect the expertise for which our analysts are renowned."
According to Fox News, the CIA released three redacted assessments as part of the disclosure, spanning from 2015 to 2021. The titles alone tell a story about what the intelligence community was spending its time and credibility on.
Consider what America's premier intelligence agency deemed worthy of formal assessment. One report, published near the end of the Obama administration, was titled "Middle East-North Africa: LGBT Activists Under Pressure." Its thesis: governments in the Middle East were taking a "tough stance" against the LGBT community, driven by "conservative public opinion and domestic political competition from Islamists," and this was "hindering US initiatives in support of LGBT rights."
Another, published in July 2020, was titled "Worldwide: Pandemic-Related Contraceptive Shortfalls Threaten Economic Development." It warned that COVID-19 was "limiting contraceptive access in the developing world" and would "probably undermine efforts to address population pressures there that are hindering economic development."
A third, published in October 2021 during the first year of the Biden administration, carried the title "Women Advancing White Racially and Ethnically Motivated Violent Extremist Radicalization and Recruitment."
These are not intelligence assessments. They are progressive policy papers with a classified header. The CIA exists to inform policymakers about threats to national security, not to produce advocacy documents about contraceptive access or LGBT activism that read like they were drafted by a think tank on K Street.
A senior administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity, indicated that most of the flagged assessments dealt with DEI-related topics. That tracks. The intelligence community spent years absorbing the same ideological assumptions that captured every other federal institution. The difference is that when the CIA lets politics contaminate its analysis, the consequences extend far beyond bad policy recommendations. They corrode the trust that policymakers need to act decisively on genuine threats.
The CIA's own release stated plainly that the assessments "did not meet CIA and IC analytic tradecraft standards and failed to be independent of political consideration." That last phrase is doing enormous work. Intelligence analysis that fails to be independent of political consideration is, by definition, propaganda. It doesn't matter whether it was produced with good intentions or ideological zeal. The output is the same: an unreliable product that serves a narrative rather than the truth.
One of the retracted assessments reportedly dealt with claims that Putin preferred Trump in 2016. The details remain sparse, but the inclusion is notable. That particular narrative became the foundation for years of political warfare against a sitting president. If the analytic product underpinning even part of that narrative failed basic tradecraft standards, the implications extend well beyond a bureaucratic correction.
Ratcliffe framed the action as a matter of institutional integrity:
"There is absolutely no room for bias in our work and when we identify instances where analytic rigor has been compromised, we have a responsibility to correct the record. These actions underscore our commitment to transparency, accountability, and objective intelligence analysis."
The question is whether correction leads to consequences. Retracting reports is necessary. It is not sufficient. The analysts who produced this work operated within a culture that rewarded ideological conformity. That culture did not build itself. Someone approved these assessments. Someone reviewed them and found nothing objectionable about the CIA's opinion on contraceptive access in the developing world as though it were a national security priority.
Former officials have reportedly questioned the decision to retract. That reaction is predictable. The people who built the system rarely welcome scrutiny of its output. But the assessments speak for themselves. Read the titles. Read the conclusions. Ask yourself whether any of them would exist if the analysts who wrote them did not already hold a particular set of political commitments.
The CIA's core mission is straightforward: collect and analyze foreign intelligence to protect the United States. Every hour an analyst spends producing a paper on LGBT activism in the Middle East or pandemic-era contraceptive logistics is an hour not spent on:
Resource allocation is a statement of priorities. And for at least a decade, the CIA's analytic priorities drifted toward subjects that aligned neatly with progressive domestic concerns rather than the hard targets that keep Americans safe.
Ratcliffe referenced "Operation ABSOLUTE RESOLVE" and "Operation MIDNIGHT HAMMER" as recent examples of analytic excellence, though details remain classified. The point is clear enough. When the agency focuses on its actual job, it delivers results. The 19 retracted assessments represent the cost of distraction.
Cleaning house at Langley was never going to be popular with the people who let the house get dirty. But 19 retracted assessments in a single review is not a rounding error. It is evidence of a systemic failure that went unchallenged for years because the bias ran in a direction that Washington's permanent class found comfortable.
That comfort is over.