Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Tulsi Gabbard on Wednesday declassified top secret emails exposing how then-DNI James Clapper in late 2016 pressured the National Security Agency (NSA) director to “compromise” his standards and fall in line behind the January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) that fraudulently claimed Russian President Vladimir Putin and his government helped President Trump win the 2016 election.
The newly released emails reveal that when then-NSA Director Mike Rogers raised concerns about the shoddy intelligence assessment, Clapper responded that it was a “team sport” that required “compromise on our ‘normal modalities.'”
Clapper also told Rogers that the hastily produced ICA would be “OUR story and we’re sticking to it.”
Records reviewed by the Federalist, last month revealed that IC officials outside of the Obama cabal had determined there was no evidence to substantiate the claim that Russia meddled in the 2016 election to help Trump win.
On December 22, 2016, Rogers raised concerns about the highly questionable ICA in an email to Clapper, then-FBI Director James Comey, and then-CIA Director John Brennan.
In the email, Rogers said that he had asked NSA personnel if they’d had “sufficient access” to the “underlying intelligence” in report’s claims and relayed that his team had indicated they were not “fully comfortable saying that they have had enough time to review all of the intelligence to be absolutely confident in their assessments.”
In his emailed response, Clapper said he understood Rogers’ concerns, but that it was “essential” that the CIA, FBI, NSA, and ODNI “all be on the same page and are all supportive of the report.”
Clapper added that this effort would be “in the highest tradition of That’s OUR story and we’re sticking to it.”
He told Rogers that they would try to “facilitate as much transparency as possible” as they completed the report, but spending more time on it was “not negotiable.”
“We may have to compromise on our ‘normal’ modalities” since we must do this on such a compressed schedule,” Clapper wrote.
Clapper’s response to Rogers came “just hours before the authors of the ICA were set to deliver the initial draft of the politicized ICA to Intelligence Community leaders,” the ODNI noted in a press release, Wednesday.
The DNI’s office in July released over 100 pages of memos, emails, and other materials revealing that Obama officials “manufactured and politicized intelligence” to create the narrative that Russia had attempted to influence the 2016 presidential election. The new information revealed that former President Barack Obama had ordered a new intelligence assessment after the Intelligence Community (IC) had repeatedly determined that Russia lacked the intent and capability to impact the 2016 election via cyber attacks.
The new intelligence assessment claimed Putin had “ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the US presidential election.”
Gabbard in July sent a criminal referral to the Department of Justice outlining how the Obama Administration’s weaponized intelligence after the 2016 election to launch a years long coup against newly-elected President Donald Trump.
“The leading figures in the Russia Hoax have spent years deceiving the American public by presenting their manufactured and politicized assessments as credible intelligence,” Gabbard said in a statement Wednesday. “The email released today reinforces what we already exposed: the decision to compromise standards and violate protocols in the creation of the 2017 manufactured intelligence assessment was deliberate and came from the very top. Clapper’s own words confirm that complying with the order to manufacture intelligence was a ‘team sport.’”