Ben Rhodes is the brother of CBS News president David Rhodes.
On June 22, 2018, he is interviewed by CBS News and says:
(…) “It was not until after President Obama ordered what became the 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment – an effort led by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence – that the picture became clearer and starker, Rhodes said.
“My sense was all of the information that went into that review – suddenly different things are corroborating each other,” he said, adding that this included information that came to light only after the election. He also explained that the inclusion of information from the FBI, in particular, brought much more of the picture into focus.
“When the FBI’s material was put together with everything else, once again, it confirmed a more alarmist picture of what had happened,” Rhodes told Morell. The delivery of that cumulative assessment, Rhodes said, was what “drove the needle to ten.”
In April, 2019:
“Ben Rhodes, the former deputy national security advisor to President Obama, told Nicholas Ballasy with PJ Media that Attorney General Bill Barr and the Justice Department “will find nothing” showing that former President Obama or his White House staff had any political “involvement” with the FBI investigation of the Trump campaign or the creation or distribution of the Steele dossier.
“No, no, I cannot be clear enough about this. We didn’t even know there was an FBI investigation of Trump. I didn’t. President Obama didn’t, like, we actually abided by the firewalls between – if there were any investigations that took place, those decisions were made in the Justice Department, in the FBI, not in the White House,” Rhodes said following a discussion at Georgetown University about his book, “The World as It Is: A Memoir of the Obama White House,” on Thursday.” (RealClearPolitics, 4/29/2019)