Declassified emails reveal effort to push a unified 2017 Russia ICA

Newly declassified emails reveal that in the final weeks of the Obama administration, top intelligence officials faced intense internal pressure to produce a January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment on Russian interference in the 2016 election. The correspondence shows then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper urging the community to fall in line behind a unified narrative, even as the National Security Agency’s director warned that his analysts did not have enough time or access to the underlying data to be absolutely confident in the conclusions. The disclosures come as federal investigators consider whether senior officials misrepresented intelligence or pressured colleagues to reach a predetermined conclusion.

According to the declassified messages, Dec. 22, 2016, marked a critical moment. The NSA’s Mike Rogers wrote that his team had not had sufficient access to the underlying intelligence and had not had enough time to review it, raising concerns about whether the final product could be endorsed by all agencies. In response, Clapper told Rogers, Brennan and Comey that the process could not be slowed and that “we may have to compromise on our normal...