Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has released declassified material showing how the 2016 intelligence assessment was rewritten after the election to fit a narrative that Russia preferred Donald Trump. The Steele Dossier sat at the center of that rewrite. Public statements from the time said the dossier was ordinary campaign research. The new records show senior Democrats treated it as something more useful. One name that keeps appearing in the surrounding discussion is Senator Tim Kaine.
What Kaine Said Then and What the Record Shows Now
In October 2017 Kaine went on television and described the dossier as the product of a conservative publication that later handed the work to the Clinton campaign. He called it routine opposition research that every candidate commissions. That account left out the sequence. Fusion GPS had already been paid by the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign when it hired Christopher Steele. The resulting reports were filled with unverified claims that the FBI later used to obtain surveillance warrants. Kaine was the Democratic nominee for vice president in the same election. He sat on the committees that received briefings on the intelligence assessment that incorporated the dossier.
Gabbard’s releases document that the intelligence community’s pre-election assessments did not support the claim that Russia was trying to elect Trump through cyber means. After the election those assessments were replaced. The new version cited the dossier even though multiple analysts had already flagged it as unreliable. The public line from Democrats, including Kaine, remained that the dossier was just research and that the real issue was Russian interference. The declassified material shows the dossier was used to reverse the earlier conclusions.
Tim Kaine plays his nice guy routine, but every time the curtain is pulled back it’s revealed that he is a cutthroat Deep State operative who abuses his power for political gain.
If this is true, he should absolutely be kicked off the panel.
— ROOZ (@ROOZVA) October 26, 2026
The Limits of What Has Been Released
No document released by Gabbard so far states that Kaine personally ordered Steele to begin writing the reports or drafted any of them. The strongest claims circulating online—that he was the mastermind or that he wrote the dossier himself—rest on commentary, not on the declassified pages. What the record does establish is that Kaine was a senior figure in the campaign that funded the work, that he later described the funding inaccurately in public, and that he continued to treat the resulting intelligence product as legitimate long after its problems were known inside the government.
What the Conduct Warrants
A sitting senator who participates in a campaign that pays for unverified foreign-sourced material, then uses his position to defend the product while the government treats it as fact, has crossed the line from politics into the use of official power for partisan ends. The proper response is not a polite letter. It is expulsion from the Senate Intelligence and Armed Services Committees, followed by a formal inquiry into whether his statements to the public and to colleagues amounted to deliberate misrepresentation of classified or sensitive matters. If the inquiry finds that he knew the dossier was unreliable and still pressed for its use in official assessments, the next step is referral for prosecution under the statutes that cover false statements and conspiracy to defraud the United States. Those statutes carry prison terms. Whether they are applied depends on whether the Justice Department treats a former vice-presidential nominee the same way it treats anyone else who helps manufacture a false predicate for surveillance.
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