By a vote of 9 to 0, the Supreme Court awarded the Central Intelligence Agency broad discretionary powers enabling it to withhold from the public the identities of its sources of intelligence information.
"It" does not necessarily refer to the subject or the object; instead, it depends on the logic of the sentence. Sometimes "it" is preferred to refer to the subject, but in OG222, it's not the case. I always suggest skipping the referent problem and making judgement based on others you can easily tell right and wrong.