by WorldTribune Staff, August 15, 2025 Real World News
Obama era Director of National Intelligence James Clapper demanded the Intelligence Community (IC) “fall in line behind the Russia hoax,” current Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard said of emails from December 2016 that she declassified this week.
Clapper was “complying with President Obama’s order to create the manufactured ICA (Intelligence Community Assessment) about Russia,” Gabbard said.
In the emails, Clapper admits that it was a “team sport” that required “compromise on our ‘normal modalities.’ ”
In the December 22, 2016 email chain declassified by Gabbard, then-NSA head Michael Rogers expressed concerns raised by his team over the “fast-track” effort and how they did not have “enough time to review all of the intelligence to be absolutely confident in their assessments.”
Rogers wrote:
“I’ve just returned from a TDY overseas and been updated on the current status of our efforts to produce a joint product related to Russian attribution and intent for the DNC/DCCC hacks. I know that this activity is on a fast-track and that folks have been working very hard to put together a product that can be provided to the President. However, I wanted to reach out to you directly to let you know of some concerns I have with what I am hearing from my folks.”
The email continued: “Specifically, I asked my team if they’d had sufficient access to the underlying intelligence and sufficient time to review that intelligence. On both points my team raised concerns. They were clear that, at the staff level, folks have been forward-leaning and trying to ensure that we have an opportunity to review and weigh in, but I’m concerned that, given the expedited nature of this activity, my folks aren’t fully comfortable saying that they have had enough time to review all of the intelligence to be absolutely confident in their assessments.”
He said that he wanted “to be clear” that he was “not saying that we disagree substantively, but I do want to make sure that, when we are asked in the future whether we can absolutely stand behind the paper, that we don’t have any reason to hesitate because of the process.”
Clapper replied later that day:
“Understand your concern. It is essential that we (CIA/NSA/FBI/ODNI) be on the same page and are all supportive of the report — in the highest tradition of ‘that’s OUR story, and we’re sticking to it.’ This evening, CIA has provided to the NIC the complete draft generated by the ad hoc fusion cell.”
Intelligence community officials told Fox News that the “ad hoc fusion cell” was a small team put together by then-CIA Director John Brennan to draft what would be the 2017 ICA.
Clapper’s email continued, “We will facilitate as much mutual transparency as possible as we complete the report, but, more time is not negotiable. We may have to compromise on our ‘normal’ modalities, since we must do this on such a compressed schedule. This is one project that has to be a team sport.”
Documents declassified by Gabbard in July revealed that in early December 2016, prior to the email chain, intelligence officials gave a document to Obama that stated: “We assess that Russian and criminal actors did not impact recent US election results by conducting malicious cyber activities against election infrastructure.” It goes on to list various attempts at interference in voter registration databases that were not successful and that “Criminal activity also failed to reach the scale and sophistication necessary to change election outcomes.”
“We have low-to-moderate confidence in the Russian Government’s involvement because of our uncertainty about its utility for a state actor, a lack of observed effects from the low-profile operation, and the actors’ use of obfuscation techniques, which included substantial overlap with criminal actors using similar targeting patterns and tactics,” it read.
In an Aug. 14 analysis, investigative journalist Matt Taibbi noted that the newly declassified emails show “that in assembling perhaps the most high-profile group analysis since the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq’s WMD program, four of America’s most powerful enforcement officials said, ‘To hell with evidence, let’s just put out a tale and stick with it.’ ”
In the specific context of the Russiagate scandal, Taibbi continued, “it makes a joke of years of public narratives about Trump, Putin, and Russia. Along with more documents funneled from Kash Patel’s FBI to Just The News asserting that senior Justice Department officials squashed Hillary Clinton corruption investigations, and that Comey gave a middleman access to highly classified information to help plead his case to newspapers like the New York Times, the new Gabbard docs further elucidate how years of Russia mania were built on fraud.”
Taibbi concluded:
“The legacy press is ignoring the releases both because they paint Donald Trump as a victim of overreach and because the press played such a prominent role in the Russiagate corruption. They’re betraying audiences who might be concerned about the larger pattern coming into relief. That story is about intelligence agencies meddling in domestic politics at all — Trump or no Trump — through a list of forbidden practices. We’re about to find out that far more people in the political world were under routine surveillance than previously thought, including mainstream and independent reporters who communicated with political sources of all stripes.”
Clapper rushed Russiagate: ‘Have to compromise’ our ‘normal modalities’ added by Editor Two on
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