A few weeks after the 2016 presidential election, a handful of Democratic senators sent a top secret letter to President Barack Obama.

They wrote that they had “serious concerns” about classified information recently provided to the Senate Intelligence Committee about “Russian Active Measures and election related cyber activity associated with the Russian intelligence services.”

“Despite the broad national interest in this topic, this new information has not been provided to the American people,” states the Nov. 29, 2016, letter signed by eight Democratic senators, including the incoming ranking member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Mark Warner.



Although the details of what the senators wanted Obama to share with the public were redacted for national security reasons, three intelligence sources told BuzzFeed News the redacted portion refers to specific efforts by the Kremlin to steer people to cast votes for Trump.



The letter was obtained by BuzzFeed News and Ryan Shapiro, the executive director of the transparency group Property of the People, in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against US intelligence agencies. It has not been publicly disclosed before. A two-sentence, unclassified version of the letter was released by Sen. Ron Wyden on Nov. 30, 2016.

This document, along with a handful of heavily redacted emails and previously unpublished talking points prepared prior to the 2016 election, provides new insight into the intelligence community’s behind-the-scenes efforts to respond to Russia’s interference and the pressure Democratic senators placed on the Obama administration to go public with what it knew.

But Obama never responded to the senators’ letter.