Declassified Records Show Obama Lied to Americans, Sabotaged Transition of Power
By: Joy Pullmann | July 21, 2025
Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2025/07/21/declassified-records-show-obama-lied-to-americans-sabotaged-transition-of-power/
Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard released 114 pages of newly declassified Obama administration records Friday.
Joy Pullmann
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President Barack Obama was among the U.S. leaders directing intelligence agencies to lie about Russians tipping the 2016 election to Donald Trump, reaffirm newly declassified U.S. intelligence records.
The Obama administration’s use of U.S. intelligence to back false claims about Trump and Russia sabotaged the peaceful transition of power necessary for democratic self-government. It denied the American majority the policies they voted for by consuming the first Trump administration with fabricated scandals, including a massive special counsel investigation. These also wasted hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars and damaged U.S. foreign policy, likely feeding the still-raging Russia-Ukraine war.
An unclassified memorandum to Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, a former Democrat member of Congress, was released Friday. It quotes newly declassified federal records that demonstrate U.S. intelligence agencies in 2016 believed Russia could not manipulate vote counts in favor of Trump or any other candidate.
It also reproduces formerly classified documents showing that Obama and his top intelligence officials — including Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, CIA Director John Brennan, and FBI Director James Comey — tossed aside such evidence to rush out a doctored “intelligence assessment” that falsely claimed the opposite. Under U.S. intelligence branding, that assessment relied on fabricated information funded by the Hillary Clinton campaign to falsely claim Trump was a Russian stooge.
The New York Times has run articles just in the last few months still promoting the conclusions of the doctored Jan. 6. 2017 “intelligence community assessment,” or ICA. A Rasmussen poll conducted just two weeks ago found 60 percent of Democrat voters and 45 percent of “moderates” still believe “the Trump campaign colluded with the Russian government to win the 2016 election.” Fifty-seven percent of those polled agreed officials who manipulated evidence to “get Trump” should be prosecuted.
Obama Called for Packaging Smears As an Intelligence Assessment
Numerous email communications contained in a 114-page accompanying packet of declassified records also released Friday confirm that it was Obama who directed the rushed creation of an ICA outside normal protocols that lied to Americans about Russian interference in U.S. elections and smeared Trump as a treasonous colluder with Russia.
A Dec. 7, 2016 Department of Homeland Security (DHS) email to CIA, DHS, and ODNI recipients wrote of “discuss[ing] a NIC [intelligence community] product in response to POTUS” that “would mirror” an intelligence assessment produced in September. The September assessment said Russians couldn’t change U.S. vote totals. Later emails agreed the CIA, then led by Brennan, would lead the construction of this Obama-requested ICA.
A Dec. 9, 2016, email from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) tells 13 other ODNI and one CIA recipient, “The IC [intelligence community] is prepared to produce an assessment per the President’s request, that pulls together the information we have on the tools Moscow used and the actions it took to influence the 2016 election.”
The email set a date target for delivering the assessment to Obama on Jan. 9, 2017. That date was later moved up to Jan. 6, 2017, with top security state officials working through the holidays to release the intelligence-branded packet of smear tinder before Obama left office.
A Dec. 22, 2016 ODNI email about the Democrat disinformation-riddled ICA tells other ODNI recipients, “The only real direction we got was 1) POTUS wants a comprehensive assessment, drawing from all available sources, and 2) it has to be before the end of his administration.”
Another Dec. 22, 2016, email between top-level DNI officials concerns “the IC [intelligence community] report on Russian election meddling that POTUS tasked us to do.”
In addition to the disinformation ICA he directed at Congress and the public, Obama directly lied to Americans in speeches about Russian election interference. For example, on Dec. 16, 2016, Obama stated he was “concerned about … potential hacking that could hamper vote counting and affect the actual election process itself. And so in early September, when I saw President Putin in China, I felt that the most effective way to ensure that, that didn’t happen was to talk to him directly. And tell him to cut it out.”
At that time, however, Obama had to know U.S. intelligence agencies had assessed that statement to be false, because his staff had prevented the publication of an earlier intelligence assessment saying so, the newly released documents show. This also means the same people and agencies that erected a totalitarian censorship edifice under the pretext of “misinformation” and “disinformation” were in fact the top sources of widely believed misinformation and disinformation that have now affected at least three U.S. presidential elections.
U.S. Intel Said Russians Couldn’t Change Votes
The memorandum gives a timeline showing that U.S. intelligence analysts, agencies, and reports leading up to the 2016 election had repeatedly concluded Russia couldn’t hack U.S. elections or change vote totals. Clapper received an intelligence analysis in August 2016 stating, “there is no indication of a Russian threat to directly manipulate the actual vote count through cyber means.”
Instead, U.S. intelligence believed Russian activity was more propagandistic, affecting public confidence in the election but not its outcome. Numerous other high-level intelligence officials and assessments made similar conclusions — until December 2016.
On Dec. 8, there was a sudden switch. Multiple intelligence agencies were preparing to publish an assessment stating, “Russian and criminal actors did not impact recent US election results by conducting malicious cyber activities against election infrastructure.”
Yet on Dec. 8, 2016, Comey suddenly declared the FBI would withdraw its support for that cross-agency conclusion, and the FBI would instead be “drafting a dissent,” the newly declassified documents show. That report was ultimately never published.
Instead, on Dec. 9, the White House held a national security meeting that included Clapper, National Security Advisor Susan Rice, Secretary of State John Kerry, CIA Director John Brennan, Andrew McCabe (Comey’s deputy), Attorney General Loretta Lynch, and Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes. After the meeting, Clapper’s assistant sent an email to ODNI leaders with the subject line, “POTUS Tasking on Russia Election Meddling.” In the email, the assistant asks them to create an “assessment per the President’s request,” with input from the CIA, FBI, National Security Agency, and Department of Homeland Security. This meant sidelining several intelligence agencies that normally contribute to such publications.
Hollering Collusion Lies Into a Media Echo Chamber
“That same day,” Dec. 9, 2016, “Deep State officials in the IC begin leaking blatantly false intelligence to the Washington Post,” says the Gabbard memo released Friday, “… claiming that Russia used ‘cyber means’ to influence ‘the outcome of the election.’” The leaks seeded the false “Russia, Russia, Russia” narrative throughout willing corporate media partners in advance of the publication of the disinformation ICA on Jan. 6, 2017.
The doctored ICA itself crystalized and legitimized myriad politicized false claims that went on to hamstring the first Trump presidency. For example, it smeared rising pro-democracy movements across the West of citizens against international oligarchs as authoritarian by linking them with Vladimir Putin, claiming “Russian media hailed President-elect Trump’s victory as a vindication of Putin’s advocacy of global populist movements.”
Rhodes, a top Obama foreign policy advisor, was in on the Dec. 9, 2016 meeting that appears to have planned the ICA switcheroo. Rhodes is infamous for telling The New York Times in 2016 that the Obama administration “created an echo chamber” in corporate media to sell Obama’s payout of American tax dollars to Iran and government takeover of formerly private health markets: “We created an echo chamber. They [corporate media reporters] were saying things that validated what we had given them to say.”
“The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns,” Rhodes explained. “They literally know nothing.”
The documents released Friday further substantiate previous reporting by The Federalist going back to 2017 that: Obama was likely directly involved with his administration’s spying on the Trump campaign; the Obama administration spied on domestic political opponents; an email from Susan Rice implicated Obama in the Russia collusion smear against Trump; Obama intelligence officials likely lied to Congress; and that Obama himself was involved in ensnaring Trump’s first national security advisor in yet another fabricated scandal using spying, leaking, and manipulation of U.S. intelligence.
Steele Dossier Key to Potential Perjury, Conspiracy Prosecution
On Jan. 6, 2017, two weeks before Trump took office, the Obama administration published the doctored ICA. The Friday memo says that ICA falsely claimed “Putin directed an effort to help President Trump defeat Hillary Clinton,” launching years of smears and investigations.
That falsified ICA at least partly relied on the infamous Steele dossier, according to a memorandum released two weeks ago by current CIA Director John Ratcliffe. That “dossier” was an opposition research packet fabricated by British spook Christopher Steele for the Clinton campaign that has been roundly debunked since, including by a special counsel investigation.
In May 2023 (and at several other times), Brennan testified to Congress that the CIA opposed using the Steele dossier in the 2017 Russia collusion ICA he was heavily involved in creating. Yet a CIA internal review released earlier this month says Brennan included the Steele dossier in the ICA “over the objections of career intelligence officials.” The Federalist also reported that still-classified congressional reports show ICA-related Obama administration corruption is much deeper than what is currently publicly known.
FBI Director Kash Patel opened criminal investigations into Brennan and Comey earlier this month and is considering not just perjury but also conspiracy charges, according to Matt Taibbi at Racket News.
Joy Pullmann is executive editor of The Federalist. Her latest book with Regnery is “False Flag: Why Queer Politics Mean the End of America.” A happy wife and the mother of six children, her ebooks include the NEW “300 Classic Books for Ages 9 to Adult,” the bestselling “Classic Books For Young Children,” and “101 Strategies For Living Well Amid Inflation.” An 18-year education and politics reporter, Joy has testified before nearly two dozen legislatures on education policy and appeared on major media including Tucker Carlson, CNN, Fox News, OANN, NewsMax, Ben Shapiro, and Dennis Prager. Joy is a grateful graduate of the Hillsdale College honors and journalism programs who identifies as native American and gender natural. Joy is also the cofounder of a high-performing Christian classical school and the author and coauthor of classical curricula. Her traditionally published books also include “The Education Invasion: How Common Core Fights Parents for Control of American Kids,” from Encounter Books.
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