While the release of two key — and contradictory — documents about Russia’s role in 2016 election interference grabbed the headlines from Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard’s document drop last week, buried in the report is an eerie email exchange about the so-called “Steele dossier” and how it got into intelligence assessments.

Gabbard released a plethora of documents on Friday about how the intelligence community assessed Russian intervention in the presidential contest between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton during Barack Obama’s last days in office.

An initial Presidential Daily Brief stated that there was minimal evidence of substantial intervention and that hacks “had no impact on recent U.S. election results.”

However, Gabbard stated that on December 8, 2016, PDB was removed and never given. Instead, less than a month later, a fresh document was produced that demonstrated significantly greater confidence in Russia’s interference in the Trump campaign. Gabbard revealed that Obama’s DNI, James Clapper, started working on it the day after the December 8 PDB was removed.

At the back of Gabbard’s 114-page document release was an odd email conversation between various intelligence officials about the importance of the Steele dossier in the assessment and whether it was properly added as an appendix.

The conversation arises from Kimberly Hermann’s (the conservative Southeastern Legal Foundation’s) 2019 Freedom of Information Act request, which sought references to the dossier on specific government platforms.

The dossier, named after former MI6 agent Christopher Steele, was originally created as opposition research for the Hillary Clinton campaign. It subsequently made its way into demands for warrants against Trump campaign personnel and assessments of Russian influence in the 2016 campaign, even though the majority of its accusations could not be substantiated and were demonstrably untrue.

A September 18, 2019, email from a redacted person with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence voiced concerns about the Steele dossier’s involvement in the ODNI’s operations.

The first portion of the email was primarily about technical issues—the quantity of results that fit the query and how, owing to their location, going through all his emails would be “impractical.”

However, it gets more problematic from there: “Second, regarding the email below — I am choosing my words carefully, for your awareness, because the premise of the message is concerning,” the official wrote.

“As you know, I was a Deputy on the NIO Cyber team, also the de-facto elections team, from 2015 through this year,” the official wrote. “I have intermittently participated in IC foreign influence and election security efforts from 2014 through this evening.”

“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 said.

This was important, they said, because even though they were “not in all of the Russia compartments, and so I did not participate in the crafting of the compartmented version,” they had queried about other information that might be involved.

A response from the original sender, a few hours later, tried to “cut to the chase” about it: “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, throughout his entire tenure here. I prefer to think that isn’t true, but if it was, we have a problem.”

The response to that specific point, from the superior: “[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.”

The email is denuded of significant context by redaction, so it’s unclear how important it was. However, Gabbard felt the need to append it as part of an annex to the larger report — and, given the cryptic nature of it, expect to hear more about it in the coming days and weeks from FBI Director Kash Patel, particularly involving the identity of these two individuals.