New declassified emails show key spy shocked to learn Steele dossier used in Russian meddling intel

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has declassified bombshell emails showing the shocked reaction of a top cybersecurity spy when he was belatedly informed in 2019 that the discredited anti-Trump Steele dossier had been used to develop the Obama administration’s intelligence assessment on Russian meddling in the 2016 election, Just the News can reveal.

Steele, a former MI6 agent, had been hired in 2016 by the opposition research firm Fusion GPS, which was being paid by Clinton campaign lawyer Marc Elias. The dossier by discredited Steele was used by the FBI to obtain FISA warrants against a Trump campaign official, and evidence continues to emerge about how it was included in the Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) on Russia and the 2016 election.

“We have a problem,” the intelligence officer on the U.S. National Intelligence Council (NIC) wrote when he learned by accident about the dossier’s influence in the December 2016 intelligence community assessment – seemingly by accident from an email sent by another top intelligence officer who had asked him to search for material in response to a Freedom of Information Act request.

The revelation so disturbed the NIC’s deputy national intelligence officer for cybersecurity that he eventually blew the whistle, first to the U.S. intelligence community's watchdog, then to Gabbard personally, intelligence sources relayed to Just the News.

“At no time in my IC career has ‘dossier’ material ever been represented to me in a work setting as something the NIC viewed as credible, or that was influential in crafting NIC products,” the officer wrote at one point.

The CIA’s recent eight-page “lessons learned” review – released earlier in July – focused on the 2016 assessment about Russia and the November 2016 election, which was made public in January 2017. 

The review, conducted at the direction of CIA Director John Ratcliffe, concluded that “the decision by agency heads to include the Steele Dossier in the [assessment] ran counter to fundamental tradecraft principles and ultimately undermined the credibility of a key judgment.” 

According to the newly-declassified and partially-unredacted September 2019 emails obtained by Just the News, one surprising assertion was that the Steele dossier had played a role in the assessment seemed to originate with top IC election security official Shelby Pierson, who had been appointed the Election Threats Executive (ETE) within the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) by then-DNI Dan Coats just a couple of months prior. ODNI had said in July 2019 that the ETE “will serve as the DNI’s principal adviser on threats to elections and matters related to election security.”

An email from a redacted ODNI official listed as an analytic program manager doing contractor support for the NIC was sent to the IC “Election Group” as a “NIC-Tasker” on the evening of Sept. 18, 2019.

“Shelby [Pierson] believes this should be responded to by the NIC as the dossier was a factor in the 2017 ICA on the election interference in which an assessment of the document was added as an annex,” the ODNI official wrote to the IC election team in response to a FOIA request, instructing the team to search their internal files for keywords potentially linking the Steele dossier to the key men behind the ICA – Comey, Brennan, and Obama DNI James Clapper.

“Please review the attach [sic] document and conduct a search for the time period May 2016 through February 2017 of all records of communication (including emails on both .gov and non-.gov accounts, text messages, and instant chats) between the office of the Director of National Intelligence, including but not limited to former ODNI Director James Clapper, and the office of the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, including but not limited to former FBI Director James Comey, regarding the collection of memos known as the ‘Steele Dossier.’ Recommended search terms the ‘Steele’ ‘Dossier’ ‘Cater [sic] Page’ ‘James Comey’ and ‘James Clapper’ ‘John Brennan’ in any election-related files,” the email said.

The NIC’s deputy NIO for cybersecurity responded to the email with a stunned tone later that evening, messaging a redacted ODNI official.

“Regarding the email below – I am choosing my words carefully, for your awareness, because the premise of the message is concerning: As you know, I was a Deputy on the NIO Cyber team, also the de-facto elections team, from 2015 through this year,” the deputy NIO wrote, followed by three yet-redacted bulletpoints.

“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,” the deputy NIO wrote. “It included no dossier reference that I recall. I was not / am not in all of the Russia compartments, and so I did not participate in the crafting of the compartmented version.”

The deputy NIO continued: “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 [key judgment] that remain unresolved to this day.) At no point did I see or consider what I gather is, or was represented to be, ‘dossier’ materials.”

“To this day, I have never seen or reviewed dossier materials in a work setting. I did recently hear them referenced by two colleagues in terms consistent with the email below, which struck me as concerning and at odds with my personal experience working election issues during 2015-2017,” the deputy NIO wrote. 

“With that single, recent exception, other than the email below, at no time in my IC career has ‘dossier’ material ever been represented to me in a work setting as something the NIC viewed as credible, or that was influential in crafting NIC products.”

The deputy NIO added that he had not seen the most highly-classified version of the ICA and expressed concern that the Steele dossier may have influenced it, writing, “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 [presidential daily brief] and ICA level, to include the TS//SCI [top secret // sensitive compartmented information] version of what I believe to be the ICA referenced — we may have a different information issue.”

The unnamed ODNI official responded to the deputy NIO the next morning by asking, “Are you asking for any guidance or action by me, or is this just informational?”

The deputy NIO replied by again stressing great concern that the dossier may have been used in the ICA: “I’ll cut to the chase, saving detail for in-person if you think needed. … You DO have at least one NIC person who has been here through the whole period, & worked on the paper - me. … 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.”

“IF instead, Shelby or [REDACTED] are mis-speaking about what the NIC was considering in its analyses, it's a pretty reckless idea to fling out in an FOUO [for official use only] email,” the deputy NIO added.

The unnamed ODNI official replied that “it is routine that we get material and don’t share it with everyone — and it’s not a matter of a particular clearance.”

Since-fired FBI Director James Comey and former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe had pushed in December 2016 to include British ex-spy Christopher Steele's debunked dossier in the 2016 ICA on alleged Russian meddling. The recent CIA review sharply criticized Brennan for allegedly joining with these anti-Trump forces in the FBI in pushing to include Steele’s baseless anti-Trump dossier in the assessment. The CIA’s recent review also critiqued the “high confidence” assessment by the FBI and the CIA that Russian leader Vladimir Putin had “aspired” to help Trump win in 2016.

The NIC plays an important role inside the IC, with the ODNI website stating that “since its establishment in 1979, the NIC has served as a unique bridge between the intelligence and policy communities.” The CIA’s recent “lessons learned” memo described how the NIC was largely shut out of the ICA process — a move the CIA critiqued at length.

“From the outset, agency heads chose to marginalize the National Intelligence Council, departing significantly from standard procedures for formal IC assessments,” the CIA review stated. “The NIC did not receive or even see the final draft until just hours before the ICA was due to be published.”

Then-CIA deputy director David Cohen informed Brennan in late December 2016 that the the principal deputy director for national intelligence (PDDNI) “had called to register a concern with the process” and that the PDDNI characterized the CIA’s plan to deliver a final draft to the NIC on the day it was to be published as a “fait accompli that would jam them, both substantively and temporally.”

But the CIA said that “Brennan downplayed the concern” and responded to Cohen that the “big three” — CIA, FBI, and NSA — “have every right to agree on language that will be included verbatim in the final version of the paper.” Brennan said that the NIC would still have a “right to differ” but “I very much hope that doesn’t happen.”

The December 2016 assessment from the CIA, the FBI, and the NSA concluded with “high confidence” that Putin “ordered an influence campaign in 2016” and that Russia worked to “undermine public faith in the U.S. democratic process, denigrate former Secretary of State [Hillary] Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency” and “developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump.”

Admiral Mike Rogers, then the leader of the NSA, diverged from Brennan and Comey on one key aspect, expressing only “moderate confidence” rather than “high confidence” that Putin had “aspired to help” Trump’s election chances in 2016 by “discrediting” Clinton" and publicly contrasting her unfavorably to him.”

The recent CIA review stated that “NSA and a few other participants were not comfortable with ascribing ‘high confidence’ to the ‘aspired’ judgment. They cited the limited source base, lack of corroborating intelligence, and ‘the possibility for an alternative judgment’ as driving their discomfort.”

The publicly-available version of the December 2016 ICA stated that “further intelligence has come to light since Election Day that, when combined with Russian behavior since early November 2016, increase our confidence in our assessments of Russian motivations and goals.”

And a further declassified version of the December 2016 ICA, obtained by Just the News, also stated that “CIA and FBI have high confidence in this judgment based on sensitive information not included in this version of the assessment.”

A senior intelligence official told Just the News that those two passages were referencing two main pieces of information — a secret source closely-held by Brennan, and the anti-Trump Steele dossier.

The Ratcliffe-ordered review from earlier this month found that “ICA authors and multiple senior CIA managers — including the two senior leaders of the CIA mission center responsible for Russia — strongly opposed including the Dossier, asserting that it did not meet even the most basic tradecraft standards” and that the CIA’s then-deputy director for analysis warned in a late December 2020 email to Brennan that including the dossier in any form risked “the credibility of the entire paper.”

“Despite these objections, Brennan showed a preference for narrative consistency over analytical soundness. When confronted with specific flaws in the Dossier by the two mission center leaders — one with extensive operational experience and the other with a strong analytic background — he appeared more swayed by the Dossier's general conformity with existing theories than by legitimate tradecraft concerns,” the CIA said in its recent review, with the declassified lessons learned document stating that Brennan had written that “my bottomline is that I believe that the information warrants inclusion in the report.”

The CIA said in the review: “Ultimately, agency heads decided to include a two-page summary of the Dossier as an annex to the ICA, with a disclaimer that the material was not used ‘to reach the analytic conclusions.’ However, by placing a reference to the annex material in the main body of the ICA as the fourth supporting bullet for the judgment that Putin 'aspired' to help Trump win, the ICA implicitly elevated unsubstantiated claims to the status of credible supporting evidence, compromising the analytical integrity of the judgment.”

Earlier this month, Ratcliffe sent a criminal referral to FBI Director Kash Patel related to possible criminality by Brennan, a source told Just the News.

Brennan testified in May 2023 before the House Judiciary Committee, where he was forced to talk about the ICA and the dossier. He said the CIA had opposed including the dossier in the ICA.

Clapper also testified the same month before the same committee, telling members the dossier was not used in the ICA and that the ICA did not include any reference to the dossier and did not draw upon the anti-Trump document to reach any conclusions. He also said it was possible the dossier contained Russian disinformation.

The House Intelligence Committee’s 2018 report noted, however, that Rogers “clarified” to the committee that, in late December 2016, a two-page summary of the Steele dossier was "added" as an "Appendix to the ICA draft," and that his consideration of the classified appendix was "part of the overall ICA review/approval process."

The FBI offered Steele an “incentive” in October 2016 of up to $1 million if Steele could prove the allegations in his discredited anti-Trump dossier, but the former MI6 agent was unable to back up his claims.

The Crossfire Hurricane team also put together a lengthy spreadsheet in late 2016 laying out the wildly unsuccessful efforts taken by the bureau to attempt to verify the claims in Steele’s discredited dossier.

DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz found huge flaws with the FBI’s investigation, including criticizing the “central and essential” role of the dossier in the FBI’s politicized surveillance of former Trump campaign associate Carter Page. Horowitz found at least 17 “significant errors and omissions” related to the FISA warrants targeting Page.

The DOJ watchdog said the Steele dossier’s alleged main source – Igor Danchenko – “contradicted the allegations of a ‘well-developed conspiracy’ in” Steele’s dossier.

Declassified footnotes from Horowitz’s report provide multiple concerns that the dossier may have been infected by “Russian disinformation.” And declassified documents also show the FBI previously investigated Danchenko as a possible “threat to national security” in part due to his alleged contacts with “suspected Russian intelligence officers.”

A two-year investigation by Justice Department special counsel Robert Mueller “did not establish” any criminal Trump-Russia collusion.

And a report by Durham concluded in 2023 that “the "FBI ignored the fact that at no time before, during, or after Crossfire Hurricane were investigators able to corroborate a single substantive allegation in the Steele dossier reporting.”