CIA Director John Ratcliffe declassified a document detailing then-Vice President Joe Biden’s suppression of a 2016 intelligence assessment pertaining to his trip to Ukraine.
The intelligence report, with a subject line of: “NON-DISSEMINATED INTEL INFORMATION: Reactions of [REDACTED] Ukrainian Government Officials to the Early December Visit of Senior United States Government Official,” reads, “After the visit, these officials assessed that the Vice President of the United States has come to Kiev almost exclusively to give a generic public speech and has no intention of discussing substantive matters with Poroshenko or other officials within the Ukrainian government.”
Ukrainian officials expressed “bewilderment and disappointment” in the 2015 trip. Biden was expected to “discuss personnel matters with Poroshenko,” the document describes, noting that officials “had assumed that the U.S. Vice President would advocate in support or against specific officials within the Ukrainian government.”
Officials further “privately mused at the U.S. media scrutiny of the alleged ties of the U.S. Vice President’s family to corrupt business practices in Ukraine” and “viewed the alleged ties of the U.S. Vice President’s family to corruption in Ukraine as evidence of a double-standard within the United States Government towards matters of corruption and political power.”
The CIA’s declassification included an email dated 2016, which read that an individual in the Director of National Intelligence’s office said the “spoke with VP/NSA and he would strongly prefer the report not/not be disseminated.”
Ratcliffe said on X that the declassified material “is in the public interest.”
Ratcliffe previously released a review of the intelligence community’s analysis of Russian influence during the 2016 election, condemning Obama-era CIA Director John Brennan for opening a “very politicized inquiry” against the agency’s standards.
