CIA Retracts 19 Different Intelligence Reports After Review Found Leftist Political Bias
CIA Director John Ratcliffe has ordered the withdrawal or major revision of 19 intelligence assessments after an internal review found they did not meet the agency’s standards for analytical rigor and political neutrality, the agency said Friday.
The CIA released unredacted versions of three of the affected reports, all of which had a strong left-wing political bias.
The topics covered included LGBT activists in the Middle East, women and white violent extremism, and access to contraception during the COVID pandemic.
The reports spanned multiple administrations, including one produced under Obama, one during Trump’s first term, and one during Biden’s tenure.
According to the agency, 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.”
“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,” Ratcliffe said in a statement.
”These actions underscore our commitment to transparency, accountability, and objective intelligence analysis,” he continued.
The reports were identified during a broader review conducted by Trump’s Intelligence Advisory Board, which examined hundreds of CIA analytic products from the past decade.
An internal review led by Deputy Director Michael Ellis reached the same conclusion, the agency said.
The move follows earlier efforts by Ratcliffe to revisit past intelligence work tainted by political bias within the agency.
Last July, the CIA declassified a memo criticizing the analytic process behind the 2016 assessment that Russia sought to help Donald Trump win the presidential election.
Sen. Tom Cotton, the Republican chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said he had long questioned the quality of similar reports.
“I’ve been sending these kind of reports back to the CIA for years and observing that they contain no intelligence,” Cotton wrote on X.
“Our intelligence agencies have too often missed critical national-security developments to waste time on, for instance, how ‘pandemic-related contraceptive shortfalls threaten economic development,’” he added.
I’ve been sending these kind of reports back to the CIA for years and observing that they contain no intelligence. Our intelligence agencies have too often missed critical national-security developments to waste time on, for instance, how “pandemic-related contraceptive… https://t.co/oP7nFykiBY
— Tom Cotton (@SenTomCotton) February 20, 2026
Sen. Mark Warner, the committee’s top Democrat, criticized the move as “part of a broader and deeply troubling pattern in this administration: sidelining career experts, undermining inconvenient intelligence assessments, and allowing political considerations to override professional judgment.”
“Our country depends on the Intelligence Community’s ability to provide honest, fearless analysis, even when it is uncomfortable or inconvenient for those in power,” Warner said.
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