• Declassified emails from the U.S. intelligence community reveal shock and concern over the belated discovery that the discredited Steele dossier influenced the 2017 Russia election interference assessment. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard’s release confirms key Obama-era officials circumvented traditional protocols, raising constitutional and legal questions still echoing through Washington.

WASHINGTON, D.C. (TDR) — In a remarkable disclosure poised to reignite debate over the politicization of U.S. intelligence agencies, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has declassified emails exposing internal alarm that the widely discredited Steele dossier played a role in the 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) on Russian interference in the 2016 election.

The documents, obtained by Just the News, lay bare the consternation of a senior cybersecurity officer on the National Intelligence Council (NIC) who only discovered the dossier’s usage by happenstance in late 2019 — years after its deployment in federal surveillance efforts and media narratives.

The Dossier and the Deception

Christopher Steele, a former British spy, was contracted through opposition research firm Fusion GPS with funding from the Hillary Clinton campaign via attorney Marc Elias. The dossier’s claims, many since discredited, were used by the FBI to justify FISA warrants targeting Trump campaign advisor Carter Page. It now appears the same dossier was leveraged, without full analytic scrutiny, in shaping the final ICA that informed the Obama administration’s public position on Russian election meddling.

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In one newly declassified 2019 email, a stunned deputy national intelligence officer (NIO) for cybersecurity wrote: “At no time in my IC career has ‘dossier’ material ever been represented to me…as credible or influential in crafting NIC products.”

Institutional Breakdown and Analytical Subversion

The CIA’s recent eight-page “lessons learned” review confirms the agency’s leadership disregarded fundamental tradecraft by including the Steele dossier in the ICA. The analysis criticized agency heads, particularly CIA Director John Brennan and FBI Director James Comey, for marginalizing the NIC and circumventing standard analytic procedures.

The NIC, established in 1979 to bridge intelligence and policymaking, was “shut out,” according to the review, and denied the opportunity to evaluate the final ICA draft until hours before publication. The report further notes: “Brennan showed a preference for narrative consistency over analytical soundness.”

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The dossier was ultimately appended as an annex to the ICA, but its inclusion as supportive evidence for the judgment that Russian President Vladimir Putin “aspired” to help President Trump undermined the paper’s integrity. NSA Director Adm. Mike Rogers notably expressed only “moderate confidence” in that key conclusion, citing the weak source base and potential for alternative interpretations.

Legal and Constitutional Implications

Kimberly Hermann, president of the Southeastern Legal Foundation (SLF), which has led the FOIA battles for these documents, noted the agencies’ longstanding resistance to transparency: “Today, we learned…they failed to produce them in response to SLF’s Freedom of Information Act requests and lawsuits.”

This declassification adds weight to concerns long expressed by constitutional conservatives: that the Steele dossier — unverified, partisan, and funded by a political rival — was manipulated by Obama-era intelligence officials to distort a critical assessment of Russian actions.

President Trump’s repeated criticisms of “deep state” intelligence manipulations now find fresh corroboration. The foundational principle of nonpartisan intelligence — an indispensable pillar of limited government — appears to have been eclipsed by political expediency.

The Constitutional Order and the Rule of Law

The episode hearkens back to James Madison’s caution in Federalist No. 51: “If angels were to govern men, no controls on government would be necessary.” Intelligence agencies, like all instruments of state power, must be bound by the rule of law and subject to checks against overreach. When career officers are excluded from deliberations and tradecraft is abandoned, the consequences are not merely administrative — they are constitutional.

The Department of Justice’s own inspector general, Michael Horowitz, concluded in 2019 that the Steele dossier played a “central and essential role” in obtaining surveillance warrants and contained numerous factual inaccuracies. Special Counsel John Durham’s 2023 report found that the FBI failed to corroborate any of Steele’s claims, despite offering him a $1 million reward for verification.

The Path Forward

Earlier this month, Director Gabbard forwarded a criminal referral to FBI Director Kash Patel concerning potential misconduct by Brennan. This referral comes on the heels of new testimony and admissions from Brennan and former DNI James Clapper, both of whom have attempted to distance themselves from the ICA’s controversial sourcing — despite contemporaneous documents indicating otherwise.

The American public must now reckon with the fact that an intelligence product influencing a sitting president’s transition, media coverage, and the Mueller investigation may have rested in part on what Durham called “Russian disinformation.”

How can the intelligence community restore its credibility without full transparency, real accountability, and constitutional guardrails firmly in place?

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