While the big news in the release of two key — and contradictory — documents about the role Russia played in 2016 election interference was the headline-grabber from Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard’s document drop last week, buried in the report is an eerie email exchange about the so-called “Steele dossier” and how it got into intelligence assessments.
On Friday, Gabbard released a slew of information regarding how the intelligence community viewed Russian interference in the race between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton in the last days of Barack Obama’s administration. An initial Presidential Daily Brief found that there was little evidence of serious interference and that it “did not impact recent U.S. election results” via cyberattacks.
Wow. @DNIGabbard just declassified a draft Presidential Daily Brief from Dec 8, 2016 in which Obama’s intel community assessed that Russia did not impact the 2016 election. pic.twitter.com/SVQbhB3odY
— Greg Price (@greg_price11) July 18, 2025
However, Gabbard said, that Dec. 8, 2016, PDB was pulled and never presented. Instead, less than a month later, a new document, which showed far more confidence that Russia had interfered on behalf of the Trump campaign, was presented. Gabbard released evidence that Obama’s DNI, James Clapper, began working on it the day after the Dec. 8 PDB was pulled.
The next day, top national security officials including FBI Dir James Comey, CIA Dir John Brennan and DNI James Clapper gathered at the Obama White House to discuss Russia. Obama directed the IC to create a new intelligence assessment that detailed Russian election meddling, even… pic.twitter.com/b7ly73h12t
— DNI Tulsi Gabbard (@DNIGabbard) July 18, 2025
At the back end of the 114 pages of documents that Gabbard released was an eerie email exchange between several intelligence individuals regarding the role that the Steele dossier played in the report and whether or not it was appropriately added as an annex.
The exchange involves a 2019 Freedom of Information Act request by Kimberly Hermann of the conservative Southeastern Legal Foundation, which looked for mentions of the dossier on certain government systems.
Should this analyst and his boss be ID’d and questioned by the FBI immediately?
The dossier, eponymously named after former MI6 agent Christopher Steele, was initially assembled as opposition research for the Hillary Clinton campaign. It eventually found its way into requests for warrants against Trump campaign officials and assessments of Russian interference in the 2016 campaign despite the fact that most of its assertions could not be corroborated and many were provably false.
A Sept. 18, 2019, email from a redacted official with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence raised some alarm about the fact that the Steele dossier was involved in the ODNI’s efforts at all.
The first part of the email dealt mostly with technical issues — the number of hits that match the query and how, due to their position, sorting through all his emails would be “impractical.”
However, it gets more problematic from there: “Second, regarding the email below — I am choosing my words carefully, for your awareness, because the premise of the message is concerning,” the official wrote.
“As you know, I was a Deputy on the NIO Cyber team, also the de-facto elections team, from 2015 through this year,” the official wrote. “I have intermittently participated in IC foreign influence and election security efforts from 2014 through this evening.”
“I was asked by NIO Cyber [redacted] to participate in the analytic scrub of the non-compartmented version of what I think is the 2017 ICA referenced below. It included no dossier reference that I recall,” the official said. [Emphasis theirs.]
This was important, they said, because even though they were “not in all of the Russia compartments, and so I did not participate in the crafting of the compartmented version,” they had queried about other information that might be involved.
“At no point did [redacted] suggest that there was any analytically significant reporting that I was NOT seeing, with the exception of compartmented material (I asked repeatedly, because of analytic concerns I held regarding a KJ that remain unresolved to this day),” the email read.
While it’s unclear from the chain whether the Steele dossier was regarded as “analytically significant” in that part of the investigation, they went on to note that Clapper would then go on to include it in the briefing given to Obama.
“I did hear second hand from [redacted], ostensibly recounting words of then DNI Clapper, on the day of a briefing to current [then, I think, just elect] POTUS, about inclusion of dossier materials in a presentation to POTUS elect. This was characterized as an unexpected and unwanted sudden and unilateral act by then DIR FBI Comey, and as a source of concern to the DNI,” the email read.
“To this day, I have never seen or reviewed dossier materials in a work setting,” it continued. “Bottom line — though I am glad to have been spared exposure to the material, if it was influential, I hope it was in a compartment I am not in, because otherwise — given my 5 years of working these topics at PDB and ICA level … we may have a different information issue.” [Emphasis theirs.]
This lengthy email received a terse response the next day: “are you asking for any guidance or action by me, or is this just informational?” the superior said.
A response from the original sender, a few hours later, tried to “cut to the chase” about it: “IF the Dossier material WAS used by the NIC, unless it is also compartmented, my NIO intentionally deceived and excluded me from things I was cleared for and had need to know, throughout his entire tenure here. I prefer to think that isn’t true, but if it was, we have a problem.”
The response to that specific point, from the superior: “[I]t is routine that we get material and don’t share it with everyone — and it’s not a matter of a particular clearance.”
The email is denuded of significant context by redaction, so it’s unclear how important it was. However, Gabbard felt the need to append it as part of an annex to the larger report — and, given the cryptic nature of it, expect to hear more about it in the coming days and weeks from FBI Director Kash Patel, particularly involving the identity of these two individuals.
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