Internal emails released on Friday by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard reveal that after former President Barack Obama ordered an intelligence assessment of Russia’s election influence, a top official in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence scuttled the release of an already-completed intelligence report that concluded Russian had not hacked the 2016 presidential election.
On Friday, Director Gabbard released newly declassified documents, including scores of emails related to a 7-page draft President’s Daily Brief or PDB. That draft PDB, dated December 8, 2016, concluded, “Russian and criminal actors did not impact recent US election results by conducting malicious cyber activities against election infrastructure.” But hours before the planned publication of the PDB, the ODNI’s deputy director pulled the report, purportedly due to “some new guidance.”
However, the email threads declassified last week indicate the ODNI instead buried the PDB to provide the intelligence community cover to issue a contrary assessment concerning Russia’s efforts to interfere in the 2016 election — and did so, against the recommendations of a wide array of intelligence professionals.
Specifically, on Thursday, December 8, 2016, the “Deputy National Intelligence Officer for Cyber Issues” for ODNI responded to an earlier email from the Deputy Director of ODNI concerning the publication of the PDB. “The room’s thoughts (EEMC, NIO Russia, CTIIC, NSA, FBI, CCI) were that it was worth going ahead with the pdb if possible now to provide our current understanding of what happened during the election, and that worst case the ICA has some language and an associated briefer note explaining any changes between the products.”
So, according to a high-level ODNI intelligence officer, representatives from the Europe Eurasia Mission Center (EEMC), National Intelligence Officer(s) (NIO) for Russia, the Cyber Threat Intelligence Integration Center (CTIIC), the National Security Agency (NSA), the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI), and the Center for Cyber Intelligence (CCI), believed the PDB should go forward “to provide our current understanding of what happened during the election, . . . ”
That email came in response to an email the Deputy Director of ODNI had sent out late in the afternoon on December 7, 2016, suggesting the PDB be distributed at the same time as the ICA report “to make sure they have the same bottom lines.”
In response, not only did the ODNI intelligence officer stress that the “room” of analysts believed the PDB should go forward, but he (or she) also stressed that “the ICA probably won’t be done until mid-January,” adding “[w]e are tentatively shooting for 9 January to send a possibly draft, possibly final, version to POTUS.”
The ODNI intelligence officer added that the team was “hoping for final agreement on scope/length/classification to come out of [the National Security Council Principals Committee] on Friday.” The email then concluded by explaining that the PDB was “an issue of high level of congressional and WH interest right now,” and that holding for the ICA “would postpone its publication for a month.”
The email thread Gabbard released did not include a response from the deputy director of the ODNI. However, another email thread established that as of the afternoon of Thursday, December 8, 2016, analysts planned to publish the PDB on Friday due to “high administration interest.” And just the day before, the ODNI had drafted talking points regarding the PDB, including that “[f]oreign adversaries did not use cyberattacks on election infrastructure to alter the US Presidential election outcome” and that “[w]e have no evidence of cyber manipulation of election infrastructure intended to alter results.”
But then at 3:48 p.m. on Thursday, December 8, 2016, the FBI emailed other members of the intelligence team that the “FBI will be drafting a dissent this afternoon” to the PDB. “Please remove our seal an annotations of co-authorship,” the email from the FBI concluded.
The FBI’s email caught the DHS officer responsible for coordinating the publication of the PDB by surprise, with the analyst responding at 4:32 p.m. that “[u]ntil receiving the email below, the only difference that I was aware of between FBI and [DHS’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis] over this transparently developed product was over confidence level on the attribution, which we have adjusted (to the FBI’s view) upon review of the recent redacted collection.” “Rather than drafting a dissent,” the DHS email continued, the “FBI could share their concerns with the most recent draft (attached).”
A 4:47 p.m. email from the FBI — possibly from a different agent — said the bureau would “take a closer look at it tomorrow.”
https://thefederalist.com/2025/07/21/obamas-odni-scuttled-intelligence-briefing-to-preserve-russia-collusion-hoax/