A senior U.S. intelligence official-turned-whistleblower said Obama-era superiors pressured him to endorse flawed conclusions in a high-profile intelligence report on Russian election interference and that he was later cut out of key discussions after raising concerns about the Steele dossier’s role in shaping that assessment, according to newly declassified information.
The whistleblower, who served as deputy national intelligence officer at the National Intelligence Council from 2015 to 2020, said in a declassified statement published Thursday that he “could not concur in good conscience” with parts of the Jan. 6, 2017 intelligence community assessment, which concluded that Russia interfered in the 2016 election with the specific goal of helping elect President Donald Trump.
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NEW: Whistleblower reveals how they were threatened by a supervisor to go along with the Obama-directed Russia hoax “intelligence” assessment, even though they knew it was not credible or accurate. The Whistleblower refused.
— DNI Tulsi Gabbard (@DNIGabbard) July 31, 2025
Yesterday we released the Whistleblower's firsthand… pic.twitter.com/Oc6mwgSmMq
“I was pressured to alter my views,” the whistleblower said, referring to what he called a coordinated push within the intelligence community to show consensus around conclusions he believed were analytically unsupported. “My concurrence was sought to enable buy-in from the Defense Intelligence Agency.”
The declassified testimony was released Thursday by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, who praised the whistleblower for “putting his own well-being on the line to defend our democratic republic” and exposing a manipulation of intelligence “at the highest levels of government.”
Gabbard, a former Democrat turned independent, has been at the center of the Trump administration’s push to reveal what it describes as a politically motivated operation under then-President Barack Obama to undermine Trump’s 2016 victory.
Due to a redaction on the 10-page document, it is not immediately clear when the whistleblower’s statement was drafted. His testimony makes clear that he made attempts from 2020 through at least 2022 to urge the intelligence community inspector general to take his claims seriously, but never received the follow-up engagement that a DOJ representative stated in 2022 would occur.
Dissent, sidelining, and Steele
In the weeks leading up to the 2017 ICA publication, the whistleblower said he was excluded from key discussions despite having led a prior assessment on cyber threats to the 2016 election.
The whistleblower said he objected to framing the Russian operation as a bid to help Trump, rather than a broader attempt to sow discord and distrust, which was the intelligence community’s view until after Trump won the election and Obama ordered a new assessment. The whistleblower also accused colleagues of omitting the role of other foreign nations, including U.S. allies, in attempting to influence the American electorate.
The whistleblower said that, after the election, the intelligence community continued to view the Steele dossier as “non-credible sensationalism” and noted that “to my knowledge the material had never been taken seriously by the IC.”
In 2019, however, he said he discovered that the now-discredited Steele dossier commissioned by the Clinton campaign had in fact been a “factor” in the 2017 ICA, contrary to what he was told internally at the time. “I felt misled,” he said, adding that when he raised the issue with NIC leadership, he was dismissed and subsequently removed from the internal “ELECTION_INFLUENCE” email distribution list.
A pattern of concealment
The whistleblower also claimed he was instructed in 2016 to conceal from the National Security Council evidence of intercepted communications from members of the incoming Trump administration. That alleged instruction, he said, came as he was working under then-DNI James Clapper and then-CIA Director John Brennan, both of whom were involved in crafting the ICA at Obama’s direction.
He brought his concerns to the IC IG beginning in 2019 and held multiple recorded interviews with IG staff over the next several years. In 2022, after the IC IG said it had no authority to forward his information to the Justice Department, he initiated contact himself with a representative of special counsel John Durham, who acknowledged receipt of his emails but never followed up.
“I do not know if Special Counsel Durham has ever been made aware of my concerns or data,” the whistleblower wrote.
The House Permanent Select Committee on Investigation found that Brennan insisted that the underlying intelligence about Trump and Russia remain strictly limited to just a handful of hand-picked analysts, but then distributed the classified report that concluded Russia wanted to help Trump win, which was based on that intelligence, to an “extraordinarily high number” of officials.
Political fallout
The whistleblower’s account is the latest in a string of disclosures by the Trump administration as it seeks to expose what officials now describe as a deliberate campaign to weaponize the intelligence apparatus against Trump during the transition period in late 2016 and early 2017.
Earlier this month, Gabbard declassified documents and emails showing that the intelligence community did not believe Russia was trying to help Trump win until Obama ordered a new ICA after the election. CIA Director John Ratcliffe has also declassified a review and excerpts of communications showing senior officials disagreed with the use of unreliable intelligence to justify the conclusion that Russia wanted to help Trump win.
Gabbard has pledged to release more documents in the coming weeks and has called for senior Obama-era officials such as Brennan, Clapper, and Obama himself to be held accountable for misleading the public.
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The DOJ has assembled a task force to determine whether any necessary charges can or should be brought against the former officials. Figures such as Ratcliffe have pushed back on legal analysts who say the statute of limitations may hamper the department’s ability to build a criminal case.
“The American people deserve to know exactly what happened,” Gabbard said Thursday. “And they will.”