When senior Obama officials demanded a new Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) in December 2016—one month after Election Day—they were aware that dissenting voices existed within the intelligence community (IC), as they sought to suppress them.
One such voice came from a senior ODNI (Office of the Director of National Intelligence) analyst who spearheaded the September 12, 2016, ICA on cyber threats. His refusal to bend the facts rattled the intelligence apparatus.
His voice had to be silenced.
At the time, the Intelligence Community’s (IC) consensus was clear: foreign adversaries did not have—and probably would not soon gain—the capabilities to “execute widespread and undetected cyberattacks” on U.S. election infrastructure.
This judgment drew upon a substantial body of classified analysis developed over time by experts monitoring cyber threats from Russia and other geopolitical adversaries.
Then came a White House directive—issued on December 9, just one month after the 2016 presidential election—tasking the intelligence community with producing a new Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) on Russian election interference. This wasn’t a routine update. It followed closely on the heels of a terminated intelligence product.
Just hours earlier, a draft of the December 8 President’s Daily Brief (PDB) had been quietly withdrawn, reportedly under protest from the FBI.
That PDB had stated unequivocally that “Russian and criminal actors did not impact recent U.S. election results by conducting malicious cyber activities against election infrastructure.”
Now, the directive that arrived in the DNI’s inbox—titled “POTUS Tasking on Russia Election Meddling”—was more than a request for a fresh look. It was a politically ordered deliverable.
DNI Clapper now led a charged effort: to produce a new assessment that would ultimately sideline dissent, insert discredited material like the Steele dossier, and pivot the official conclusion to claim Russia acted with the intent to help Trump.
This maneuver weaponized intelligence to weaken the incoming administration, fortifying concerns of politicized manipulation at the highest levels.
The whistleblower—who had played a leading role in the September analysis—was suddenly cut off from ICA communications.
His earlier assessment was cast aside. Though he had been essential to the original effort, his professional judgment now conflicted with the new narrative, and he was treated as expendable.
The framework for the new narrative was crafted not by objective analysts but by top political operatives in the Obama national security circle.
Democrats claimed new intelligence in December 2016 justified the ICA’s shift.
But that argument collapses for two key reasons: First, the only known “new” input was the discredited Steele dossier—political opposition research tied to the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee and linked to a Russian oligarch.
Second, if good-faith analytic updates drove the ICA’s evolution, why were dissenting voices removed from the process?
The sidelining of the ODNI whistleblower—a veteran analyst with deep institutional knowledge—is a red flag.
His findings were buried, his access cut off. This was not fact-driven deliberation but an effort to engineer a predetermined conclusion. The ICA’s claim of a “pro-Trump” Russian preference stemmed not from rigorous analysis, but political intent.
The whistleblower's core objection? The ICA’s assertion that Putin personally preferred Trump and acted accordingly lacked factual basis.
When he requested sourcing, his supervisor told him that he was “not allowed to see it” and needed to “trust me on this”—a weak and dubious standard that defied analytic rigor and professional intelligence tradecraft.
At the time of drafting, the CIA and FBI knew Hillary Clinton had approved a plan—conveyed by her then-adviser Jake Sullivan (later former President Joseph Biden’s National Security Advisor)—to “stir up” a Trump-Russia scandal.
As one senior official stated:
‘Obama ordered the ICA to set Trump up and knock him off balance before he could even get started,’ said the official. ‘This was an influence operation far more consequential than anything [Russian President Vladimir] Putin cooked up. Obama and Hillary [Clinton] schemed the op, and the CIA and FBI ran it.’
On January 6, 2017—the day Congress certified Trump’s win—the ICA was publicly released, asserting that Russia acted to help Trump win. But dissenting analysts had been marginalized, and the FBI and NSA expressed only “low confidence” in linking Russian actions to pro-Trump intent—omissions buried from the public report.
The whistleblower was stunned three years later in 2019, when FOIA disclosures revealed that the Steele dossier—long discredited—had influenced the ICA. Until then, it was his understanding that DNI Clapper believed the dossier was “untrustworthy.”
That belief made Clapper’s role in directing a revised ICA, which ultimately incorporated elements of the Steele dossier, even more alarming.
In one internal email, the whistleblower pushed back firmly:
‘As for the 2017 ICA’s judgment of a decisive Russian preference for then-candidate Donald Trump,’ he wrote, ‘I could not concur in good conscience based on information available, and my professional analytic judgment.’
Meanwhile, CIA Director Brennan demanded inclusion of the dossier despite objections, writing: “My bottom line is that I believe that the information warrants inclusion in the report.”
And this episode was not isolated. As noted above, the FBI, under the leadership of Director James Comey, withdrew from the December 8 PDB and planned a formal dissent, asking that their co-authorship seal be removed.
This action followed a heads-up that the PDB would be released the next day due to “high administration interest.”
The White House then intervened and scrapped the draft altogether.
The Comey-led FBI reversed course shortly thereafter and aligned with the CIA’s purported conclusion of alleged Russian interference on behalf of Donald Trump. This alignment occurred only after a key meeting between Comey, Clapper, and CIA Director Brennan.
In plain terms: seasoned analysts with subject-matter expertise and dissenting views were excluded, a discredited partisan document was embedded into the assessment, and a hollow consensus was conjured by senior operatives within the Obama national security apparatus.
This contrived assessment was then laundered into “authoritative intelligence” by political sleight of hand—marketed not merely as the consensus of the intelligence community, but as unassailable truth.
In fact, it reversed earlier findings and violated the professional standards of the very analysts deliberately excluded from the process.
And to what end? To destroy Donald J. Trump.
Why does this matter nearly a decade after the 2016 election? Because what emerged was not an intelligence product, but an engineered narrative—one crafted not to enlighten the American people, but to deceive them.
It undermined public faith in our elections, corroded the credibility of our intelligence institutions, bolstered adversarial foreign regimes, and ratcheted up hostilities between nuclear powers.
And it did so with a single purpose: to sabotage the duly elected President before he could take office. Dissent was buried. Truth was manipulated. The American people were misled.
This was political warfare masquerading as national security—and treachery posing as patriotism. Its impact is far-reaching and will be long-lasting.
And the damage—so far unpunished—remains incalculable.
Its very success makes it all the more likely to be repeated and will only embolden the enemies of constitutional governance at home and abroad.
Ultimately, it was a far greater, and far graver, assault on the Republic than anything dreamed up by the Kremlin.
Part I showed how the narrative flipped. This installment reveals who resisted, why they were a threat, and how their views were purged. The pattern is clear—and the reckoning is just beginning.
Charlton Allen is an attorney and former chief executive officer and chief judicial officer of the North Carolina Industrial Commission. He is founder of the Madison Center for Law & Liberty, Inc., editor of The American Salient, and host of the Modern Federalist podcast. His commentary has been featured in American Thinker and linked across multiple RealClear platforms, including RealClearPolitics, RealClearWorld, RealClearDefense, RealClearHistory, and RealClearPolicy. X: @CharltonAllenNC
Image from Grok.