(The Center Square) – Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has declassified another report implying the Obama administration and Intelligence Community embarked on a bad-faith mission to link President Donald Trump with 2016 election interference by Russia.

The 19-page document includes incriminating testimony from a whistleblower who served at the National Intelligence Council from 2015 to 2020 as a Deputy National Intelligence Officer.

The whistleblower claimed they were pressured by Intelligence Community (IC) higher-ups to espouse the unproven narrative that Russian agents “hacked” cyber infrastructure to help Trump win the 2016 election.

At the behest of then-President Barack Obama and then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, the whistleblower led the 2016 Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) focused on election security. After the election occurred, the whistleblower was told to contribute to another ICA, this time specifically focusing on pre-election Russian cyber influence attempts.

From the beginning, “[s]everal aspects of the 2017 ICA’s drafting were unusual,” the whistleblower noted, including a lack of communication from the team responsible for crafting the 2017 ICA assessment.

Additionally, the “team” omitted crucial material from the whistleblower showing that Russia and multiple other countries had put out media denigrating both U.S. presidential candidates, contradicting the 2017 ICA’s eventual conclusion that Russia was acting on behalf of Trump.

The end product, the whistleblower reported, was “in contradiction” to what his supervisor “had previously implied.” The 2017 ICA relied heavily on the Steele Dossier, which Clapper and the FBI had initially viewed as “non-credible sensationalism, and to my knowledge the material had never been taken seriously by the IC.”

“I had been led to believe that the prior DNI Clapper viewed the 'Steel [sic] Dossier' material as untrustworthy, and I had believed it played no role in the 2017 ICA,” the whistleblower wrote, concluding that it “seemed” his supervisor and other national intelligence operatives “had been actively misleading me, and potentially other NIC deputies, for several years.”

Despite previously asserting feeling “uncomfortable” implying that Russia’s cyber interference impacted election results or favored Trump, the FBI “had seemingly altered its position and embraced a judgement of Russian intent to influence the election, seemingly without any new data other than the election’s unexpected result and public speculation that Russia had ‘hacked’ the vote – a scenario that, we in the IC judged, simply did not occur.”

While the whistleblower agreed with the 2017 ICA’s final judgement that Russian President Vladimir Putin sought to undermine faith in the U.S. democratic process, they could not in good faith believe “that this indicated Russian goals were, as the opening sentence of the 2017 ICA states, ‘to influence the 2016 US Presidential election’ itself.”

“As for the 2017 ICA’s judgement of a decisive Russian preference for then-candidate Donald Trump, I could not concur in good conscience based on information available, and my professional analytic judgement,” the whistleblower added.

The whistleblower’s refusal to change their assessment, since they “would not say that I agreed with an analysis that I contested,” landed them in the office of their supervisor, whose name is redacted in the documents. The whistleblower expressed their concerns about the 2017 ICA conclusions to the supervisor, but received a negative response.

“[Redacted] actively pressured me to change my judgements, and stated clearly and directly to me that [redacted] sought my concurrence as a means to persuade the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), so that DIA would provide their concurrence with the analytic assessments of the 2017 ICA,” the whistleblower recounted.

According to the whistleblower’s memory, the supervisor became visibly frustrated and said “I need you to say you agree with these judgements so that DIA will go along with them.”

The reaction confirmed to the whistleblower what they had already suspected: that the supervisor “was echoing a public narrative (that the IC ostensibly viewed as false) as a way for me to justify logical contortions needed to arrive at the analytic judgement [redacted] desired me to reach.”

For years, the whistleblower tried to have the issue reported to the Department of Justice engaging with the IC Inspector General from 2019 to 2022, but ultimately receiving no help. Staff told the whistleblower that “no procedure existed to pass information to DOJ investigators, save my taking action in personal capacity.”

The declassification of the whistleblower’s testimony follows an onslaught of other documents declassified by Gabbard that detail the Obama administration’s apparent involvement in fabricating the Trump-Russia collusion theory.

Most recently, Gabbard unveiled an investigation showing unverified emails between Clinton campaign staffers and the vice president of a George Soros-affiliated group plotting ways they intended to use Russian hacking rumors to “demonize” Trump, as The Center Square reported.