While much of the media fixated on the headline-grabbing revelations from Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard’s recent declassification of 2016 election intelligence, buried deep within the 114-page trove lies a quiet bombshell — a redacted email thread raising serious questions about how the discredited Steele dossier found its way into official U.S. intelligence assessments used to brief President-elect Donald Trump.

Gabbard’s release last Friday included two contradictory assessments on Russian interference in the 2016 election. The first, a Dec. 8, 2016 Presidential Daily Brief (PDB), found minimal evidence of foreign meddling and explicitly stated it had no impact on the election’s outcome. That PDB was reportedly suppressed and never delivered.

Instead, a new assessment — completed weeks later and far more aggressive in its claims of Russian support for the Trump campaign — was pushed forward. Gabbard revealed that former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper began crafting this revised version the very next day after the first report was shelved.

But it’s what was buried in the annex that may cause the most long-term damage for former Obama officials: an unsettling 2019 internal email thread regarding the Steele dossier — the now-debunked opposition research document commissioned by the Clinton campaign and used to justify FISA warrants against Trump allies.

The emails emerged from a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request by Kimberly Hermann of the Southeastern Legal Foundation. The unredacted portions show a former Deputy on the National Intelligence Officer (NIO) Cyber team expressing alarm over the dossier’s mysterious appearance in final intelligence assessments — even though, according to him, he never saw it used during his five years working on the topic.

“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 stated. [Emphasis in original.]

That’s critical, because despite not being cleared for all compartments, the official said he repeatedly asked if there was any “analytically significant” material being withheld — and was told no. If that wasn't true, he said, it represented an intentional deception within the intelligence hierarchy.

Even more concerning, the official recalled second-hand chatter that then-DNI Clapper was blindsided by FBI Director James Comey’s unilateral decision to include the dossier in a January 2017 briefing to President-elect Trump.

“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.

The sender concluded: “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… I prefer to think that isn’t true, but if it was, we have a problem.”

The reply from his superior was chilling in its nonchalance: “[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.”

In other words: Yes, the intelligence community used politically funded, unverified material to brief the incoming President of the United States — and key analysts working on the Russia file were either left in the dark or deliberately excluded.

This revelation fits hand-in-glove with the broader pattern Gabbard has exposed: a coordinated effort inside Obama’s intelligence agencies to scrub inconvenient facts, insert partisan narratives, and mislead both the incoming Trump administration and the American people.

And the ramifications may just be beginning.

FBI Director Kash Patel, now overseeing internal investigations into Russiagate’s origins, is reportedly planning to follow up on the individuals behind the email exchange. Their identities remain redacted — for now.

What is clear is that Tulsi Gabbard saw enough significance in the email chain to include it in her report. Expect Capitol Hill to start asking pointed questions, especially as momentum builds around criminal referrals for those involved in the Russiagate deception.