Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard released a whistleblower’s account last week describing how an Obama-era intelligence official pressured a subordinate to approve a phony assessment that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election to benefit Donald Trump.
“I was pressured to alter my views,” the senior intelligence analyst-turned-whistleblower said in documents that the DNI is using as evidence to support bombshell claims she made in July when detailing the “treasonous conspiracy” involving Obama-era officials who allegedly attempted “to subvert President Trump’s 2016 victory.”
The analyst, who took part in a 2016 Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) which determined “foreign adversaries did not use cyberattacks on election infrastructure to alter the US Presidential election outcome,” explained that “my concurrence was sought to enable [redacted] to sway the views of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA)” so that the Defense Intelligence Agency would agree to on a revised ICA.
The 2017 intelligence community assessment (ICA) relied heavily on the discredited Steele dossier and asserted that the Kremlin orchestrated the hacking of Democratic National Committee emails and intervened in the presidential election to support Trump.
“There is reporting you are not allowed to see, if you saw it, you would agree,” the analyst said a supervisor told him in early January 2017 when the analyst was asked to review the new reporting in the alternative assessment, the New York Post reported.
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“Isn’t it possible Putin has something on Trump, to blackmail and coerce him?” the supervisor continued. ”You need to TRUST ME on this.”
When the whistleblower refused to sign off on the new assessment, the “visibly frustrated” supervisor stated: “I need you to say you agree with these judgements, so that DIA will go along with them!”
“I remember this conversation very clearly, as it was a difficult situation and I listened, and chose my responses, with care,” the whistleblower wrote in the account.
“I was aware that I was defying the [National Intelligence Office’s] direction to me (to misrepresent my views to DIA) based on a conscious decision to adhere to [Intelligence Community] standards, tradecraft, and ethics,” the analyst testified.
In the end, the DIA did not join the CIA, FBI, and National Security Agency in signing off on the altered Intelligence Community Assessment that became the centerpiece of the “Russiagate” hoax.
The documents also reveal that the whistleblower made repeated efforts to raise concerns about the information used in the 2017 ICA to various government officials, including the intelligence community’s inspector general, former Special Counsel John Durham, and Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), but these attempts were unsuccessful.
“The Whistleblower put their own well-being on the line to defend our democratic republic and ensure the American people learned the truth about how President Obama directed the creation of [an] Intelligence Community Assessment that knowingly promoted falsehoods claiming Russia helped President Trump get elected in 2016,” Gabbard said in a statement.
“In doing so, the Obama Administration sought to delegitimize the 2016 election and President Trump’s presidency, subverting the will of the American people and enacting essentially a years-long coup against President Trump and the American people,” she added. “Thanks to this individual and other courageous whistleblowers, the American people are finally learning the truth about the dangerous consequences of weaponized intelligence.”
“Truth and accountability will help in ensuring this doesn’t happen again,” she said.
Vice President JD Vance, meanwhile, stated that “a lot of people” are about to be indicted as a result of the Obama administration’s actions in the so-called Russiagate scandal.
During an interview on Fox News Sunday, Vance did not reveal any specific names of people whom he thinks will be charged, but he did cite recent disclosures from Gabbard as conclusive evidence that there had been “an aggressive violation of the law” about Russiagate.