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Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has revealed how an intelligence officer and other analysts were pressured to say that Donald Trump benefited from Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election.
“I was pressured to alter my views,” the whistleblower, who was the deputy national intelligence officer for the National Intelligence Council, said in documents recently made public by Ms. Gabbard.
The senior intelligence analyst said her supervisor pressed her to change her analysis in a 2016 Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) that concluded “foreign adversaries did not use cyberattacks on election infrastructure to alter the US Presidential election outcome.”
The intelligence official said her agreement on a different ICA conclusion was needed to get the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) to sign off on a modified assessment.
A new ICA, which came out in 2017 after Mr. Trump won the election, was based on the now-debunked dossier compiled by British ex-spy Christopher Steele and paid for by the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign. The dossier linked Mr. Trump to the Kremlin, including salacious stories about Mr. Trump in Moscow.
The supervisor wanted the ICA to make that connection.
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“Isn’t it possible Putin has something on Trump, to blackmail and coerce him?” the supervisor asked. “You need to TRUST ME on this.”
When she would not sign off on the new assessment, the supervisor appeared “visibly frustrated,” according to the whistleblower, and said, “I need you to say you agree with these judgements, so that DIA will go along with them!”
“I remember this conversation very clearly,” the whistleblower recalled, “as it was a difficult situation and I listened, and chose my responses, with care.”
“I was aware that I was defying the [National Intelligence Office’s] direction to me (to misrepresent my views to DIA) based on a conscious decision to adhere to [Intelligence Community] standards, tradecraft, and ethics.”
Ultimately, the DIA did not join the CIA, FBI and the National Security Agency on the 2017 ICA.
The whistleblower said she attempted to contact several government officials about the modified assessment, including the Office of Inspector General for the Intelligence Community, Justice Department special counsel John Durham and Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, a leading Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, but received no response.
The Washington Times reached out to Mr. Warner’s office for comment.
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