The Obama administration’s top officials committed a “treasonous conspiracy” by manufacturing and politicizing intelligence to create the false narrative that led to the years-long Trump-Russia collusion probe, according to newly-declassified documents released by Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Tulsi Gabbard.
Announcing that “Americans will finally learn the truth” about shady actions taken by senior officials in former President Barack Obama’s National Security Council (NSC), Gabbard dropped damning documents that showed how they laid the groundwork for “what was essentially a years-long coup” against President Donald Trump:
Despite the intelligence community’s consensus that Russia “lacked the intent and capability to hack U.S. elections” prior to Trump’s 2016 win over Hillary Clinton, Gabbard said Obama’s officials changed their tune soon after the president won, ignoring the evidence.
“We assess that Russian and criminal actors did not impact recent US election results by conducting malicious cyber activities against election infrastructure,” a declassified December 8, 2016 Presidential Daily Brief (PDB) that was set to be published the next day stated.
While finding that “Russian Government–affiliated actors most likely compromised an Illinois voter registration database and unsuccessfully attempted the same in other states,” intelligence officials said election monitoring combined with the fact that neither vote-counting nor -casting infrastructures were harmed made it “highly unlikely” that any results were altered.
“Criminal activity also failed to reach the scale and sophistication necessary to change election outcomes,” noted the briefing, prepared by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) with reporting from the FBI, Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), National Security Agency (NSA), Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) State Department, and open sources.
The brief noted that then-DNI James Clapper’s office determined that any actions by the Russians “probably were intended to cause psychological effects, such as undermining the credibility of the election process and candidates.”
The PDB was not published the next day, however.
Recently-uncovered communications revealed that the ODNI moved to “push back publication,” based on “some new guidance.”
“It will not run tomorrow and is not likely to run until next week,” wrote the deputy director of the PDB at ODNI, whose name is redacted from the declassified documents.
This came just days after Clapper’s December 7 talking points stated: “Foreign adversaries did not use cyberattacks on election infrastructure to alter the U.S. presidential election outcome.”
Declassified communications from the FBI stated that the PDB “should not go forward” until the bureau had shared its “concerns” and drafted a “dissent.”
On the day the ODB was supposed to be published on December 9, NSC officials including Clapper, then-CIA Director John Brennan, then-National Security Advisor Susan Rice, then-Secretary of State John Kerry, then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch, then-Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe, and others, met in the White House Situation Room to discuss Russia.
The meeting’s subject line stated: “Summary of Conclusions for PC Meeting on a Sensitive Topic (REDACTED.)”
Declassified meeting records showed that principals “agreed to recommend sanctioning of certain members of the Russian military intelligence and foreign intelligence chains of command responsible for cyber operations as a response to cyber activity that attempted to influence or interfere with U.S. elections, if such activity meets the requirements” from a 2015 executive order Obama related to “Significant Malicious Cyber-Enabled Activities.”
Following the meeting, Clapper’s assistant emailed intelligence leaders telling them to create a new assessment “per the president’s request,” detailing the “tools Moscow used and actions it took to influence the 2016 election.”
“ODNI will lead this effort with participation from CIA, FBI, NSA, and DHS,” the documents state.
The original PDB was “never published,” Gabbard said:
In an even more alarming twist, she found that Obama officials “immediately leaned on their allies in the media to advance their falsehoods,” with anonymous sources within the intelligence community leaking classified information to the Washington Post, claiming that Russia had intervened in the election to help Trump.
By January 6, 2017, a new assessment that “directly contradicted the IC assessments that were made throughout the previous six months” was released, according to Gabbard’s ODNI.
“These documents detail a treasonous conspiracy by officials at the highest levels of the Obama White House to subvert the will of the American people and try to usurp the President from fulfilling his mandate,” Gabbard wrote on X:
“This betrayal concerns every American,” she continued. “The integrity of our democratic republic demands that every person involved be investigated and brought to justice to prevent this from ever happening again.”
She went on to announce that she is providing all of the documents to the Department of Justice (DOJ) to “deliver the accountability that President Trump, his family, and the American people deserve.”
ODNI officials told Fox News this Friday that the intelligence was “politicized,” and then “used as the basis for countless smears seeking to delegitimize President Trump’s victory, the years-long Mueller investigation, two Congressional impeachments, high level officials being investigated, arrested, and thrown in jail, heightened US-Russia tensions, and more.”
Gabbard told the outlet that this “is not a partisan issue,” reiterating that it “concerns every American.”
“No matter how powerful, every person involved in this conspiracy must be investigated and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, to ensure nothing like this ever happens again,” she said. “The American people’s faith and trust in our democratic republic and therefore the future of our nation depends on it.”
The bombshell declassification comes soon after the FBI launched an investigation into former CIA Director Brennan and former FBI Director James Comey over their roles in the Russia collusion probe, Breitbart News reported.
Olivia Rondeau is a politics reporter for Breitbart News based in Washington, DC. Find her on X/Twitter and Instagram.
