Newly released documents from Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Tulsi Gabbard have shattered the official narrative surrounding Russian interference in the 2016 election. A previously classified draft of the Presidential Daily Briefing (PDB), prepared for President Barack Obama on Dec. 8, 2016, shows that the formal intelligence assessment was that Russia had neither influenced the outcome of the election nor shown any preference for Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton. It was also revealed that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the National Security Agency (NSA) determined there was insufficient evidence to assert that Russia had hacked the Democratic National Committee (DNC).
Yet these candid assessments were immediately overturned. The narrative was flipped entirely, now claiming that Russia had interfered specifically to help Trump win. To lend this reversal an air of legitimacy, Obama ordered an Intelligence Community Assessment explicitly designed to support the new storyline. This dramatic about-face was immediately echoed in the press, with The Washington Post at the center of the disinformation campaign.
On the morning of Dec. 9, 2016 — just one day after the draft PDB was circulated among Obama officials — The Washington Post published an article co-authored by Ellen Nakashima reporting that President Obama had ordered a review of Russia’s role in the election. The article stated that Russia had “attempted through cyber means to interfere in, if not actively influence, the outcome” of the 2016 race.
Citing this article, the report accompanying the DNI’s new document release concludes that “Deep State officials in the IC [intelligence community]” had begun “leaking blatantly false intelligence to the Washington Post.” The DNI report goes on to state that later that same day, another leak to the Post falsely claimed the CIA had “concluded in a secret assessment that Russia intervened” in the election to help Trump.
The Washington Post’s Dishonesty
In truth, the DNI report understates just how dishonest the episode really was. While the report cites two separate leaks to the Post, suggesting two different articles, they were in fact the same story — heavily rewritten after publication. The original version, which merely claimed that Russia had attempted to interfere, was already a serious departure from the previous day’s draft PDB. But that version apparently wasn’t strong enough for the “Deep State” officials feeding Nakashima the story. Within hours, that version mysteriously vanished.
In its place appeared a completely rewritten piece — one that boldly claimed to know the outcome of an assessment that had only just been ordered. Gone were the hedged references to attempted interference. The rewrite now flatly declared that “Russia intervened in the 2016 election to help Donald Trump win the presidency.”
This was a wholesale transformation of a tentative report into a weaponized political narrative: that Trump owed his presidency to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Crucially, this rewrite appeared under the exact same URL as the original article, with no public acknowledgment, correction, or editor’s note about the massive change. The original headline, “Obama Orders Review of Russian Hacking During Presidential Campaign,” remains visible in the URL to this day. But it was replaced by the far more dramatic and loaded headline: “Secret CIA Assessment Says Russia Was Trying to Help Trump Win White House.”
The rewritten article declared that “it was now ‘quite clear’ that electing Trump was Russia’s goal, according to the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence matters.” But that directly contradicted the previous day’s draft PDB, which stated that any Russian data leaks were “probably intended to cause psychological effects, such as undermining the credibility of the election process and candidates,” not to help Trump. The PDB assessment wasn’t merely cautious. It reflected the intelligence community’s actual position, consistent with the obvious political context in which everyone, including the Russians, expected Hillary Clinton to win.
Nakashima’s rewritten article wasn’t just a dramatic pivot. It was a blatant rewrite of reality and a deliberate attempt to manufacture a new narrative in service of a political agenda. The stealthy overhaul of the initial Dec. 9 piece strongly suggests that Nakashima was acting not as a reporter, but as a willing conduit for the intelligence community. Having co-authored the original, more restrained version herself, she would have known the new narrative was false — or at the very least, highly suspect — yet she published it anyway. The secretive edit, rather than issuing a new article or a transparent update — something even the DNI report seems to have missed — makes the entire episode even more suspect.
The rewritten Dec. 9 article became the cornerstone of Obama’s public case that Trump’s election had been engineered by Putin. That same day, Lisa Monaco — Obama’s homeland security and counterterrorism adviser, later Biden’s deputy attorney general and a key figure behind the Trump and Jan. 6 prosecutions — issued a statement reaffirming the president’s order for a full intelligence community review. But this Intelligence Community Assessment was never a neutral inquiry. It was a political weapon, designed to retroactively manufacture a conclusion that directly contradicted the intelligence community’s own findings, as laid out in the Dec. 8 PDB.
Advancing a Fraudulent Narrative
This fraudulent narrative shift could not have succeeded without media complicity, particularly from The Washington Post and Nakashima, who acted as a key conduit in disseminating the falsehood crafted by Obama officials when they reversed the previous day’s intelligence assessment to claim that Russia had influenced the 2016 election.
Nakashima’s track record reveals a consistent pattern of advancing false narratives at critical moments in the Russiagate saga. On June 14, 2016, before the public was even aware of any scheme to accuse Trump of collusion with Russia, she published a widely cited article claiming that Russian government hackers had penetrated the DNC and stolen opposition research on Trump. This was the first public assertion attributing the hack to Russia, long before any official claim to this effect. As now disclosed in the DNI report, the actual assessment by both the FBI and NSA was that they had “low confidence” in attributing the DNC data leak to Russia because they lacked “sufficient technical details” to link the leak to Russian actors.
That June story was based on unnamed “committee officials and security experts” but did mention Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann, who was introduced as someone who was merely responding to the supposed Russian hacking. Sussmann, as would later emerge, was a key actor in channeling fabricated Russia-collusion allegations originating within the Clinton campaign to the FBI.
Nakashima’s reporting laid the groundwork for a narrative that would dominate the national conversation. Her June article helped set the stage for Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook’s July 24 claim that Russia was interfering to help Trump. That claim, in turn, triggered a chain reaction: Australian Ambassador to the U.K. Alexander Downer contacted the U.S. embassy in London to report a conversation he had had with Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos about the possibility that Russia had derogatory information about Hillary Clinton. As Downer would later admit, Papadopoulos had simply conveyed common talking points about Hillary Clinton’s emails. The FBI then used Downer’s vague account as a fig leaf to justify opening their own fraudulent Crossfire Hurricane investigation.
Nakashima and the Post didn’t stop there. On Sept. 5, 2016, she co-authored a piece titled “Intelligence community investigating covert Russian influence operations in the United States.” Later that evening, without editorial notice, the headline was stealthily changed to the far more alarming: “U.S. investigating potential covert Russian plan to disrupt November elections.” The Dec. 9 incident was not the first time the Post and Nakashima had deployed this covert headline-switching tactic. It appears to have been a recurring practice to reshape coverage whenever their intelligence community handlers found the original framing unsatisfactory.
Despite her central role in promoting false narratives that not only contradicted the actual intelligence assessments but which she must have known were at best highly questionable, Nakashima was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for her Russiagate coverage. The media did not simply report on Russiagate — it helped create Russiagate. And no outlet played a bigger role in manufacturing this false reality than Ellen Nakashima and The Washington Post.