The MAGA Memo: Turning Truth Into Treason, and the Past Into a Weapon

Inside the July 2025 intelligence memo that reframes bipartisan findings as conspiracy, rewrites history as revenge, and signals how authoritarian regimes weaponize memory to justify power.

Introduction: The Past Is Prologue, Unless You Rewrite It

In July 2025, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released a report accusing former President Barack Obama of attempting to “subvert” Donald Trump’s 2016 election victory. Not influence. Not critique. Subvert, a word soaked in criminal implication, used with surgical intent. The implication was unmistakable: treason.

The MAGA base responded with the same giddy certainty that’s become its trademark, confirmation, at last, that Trump’s enemies really were out to get him. Tulsi Gabbard, Pam Bondi, Trump himself. each lined up to declare this the long-awaited vindication. But it wasn’t truth they were celebrating. It was narrative maintenance. And it wasn’t even new.

Because this story, this exact story, was already investigated. Already reviewed. Already debunked. Not by Democrats. Not by MSNBC. But by a Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee in 2020.

The verdict was clear:

“The Committee found the ICA presents a coherent and well-constructed intelligence basis for the case of unprecedented Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election… The Committee did not discover any significant analytic tradecraft issues in the preparation or final presentation of the ICA.”
(Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Vol. 4, p. 6)

And:

“In all the interviews of those who drafted and prepared the ICA, the Committee heard consistently that analysts were under no politically motivated pressure to reach specific conclusions.”
(Vol. 4, p. 6)

In other words, no political tampering, no sabotage, no Obama-directed plot. The Steele dossier wasn’t used in the body of the assessment, analysts were free to dissent, and every claim was sourced from the intelligence community’s own evidence. What was produced, under pressure and in a compressed timeframe, was a rare thing in politics: honest work.

So what, exactly, is this new report doing?

It’s not informing. It’s not correcting. It’s justifying. Justifying the retroactive use of state power against political opponents by pretending it’s overdue accountability. It doesn't present new intelligence. It reframes old conclusions. It replaces evidence with insinuation. And it dresses a political act in the costume of national security.

The same movement that has spent years railing against the “deep state” is now laundering its revenge campaign through the very institutions it once condemned. What we are witnessing is not justice. It is the authoritarian’s alibi: rewrite the past to punish in the present.

This isn’t a revelation. It’s a rerun with a motive.

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1. The Baseline Reality: The 2017 ICA and 2020 Senate Findings

Before diving into today’s partisan fog, let’s anchor ourselves to a rare moment of bipartisan clarity.

In 2017, the Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) concluded that Russia interfered in the 2016 election with the intent to boost Donald Trump and undermine public faith in the democratic process. This conclusion was not drafted in the backrooms of a political campaign or whispered in Beltway gossip. It was assembled by career intelligence professionals across the CIA, FBI, and NSA under the direction of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI).

And contrary to MAGA mythmaking, it wasn’t quietly buried. It was scrutinized, publicly, thoroughly, and under a Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee.

That’s when something remarkable happened: They agreed.

“The Committee found the ICA presents a coherent and well-constructed intelligence basis for the case of unprecedented Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.”
“The Committee did not discover any significant analytic tradecraft issues in the preparation or final presentation of the ICA.”
— Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Volume 4, p. 6

This wasn’t a partisan sideshow. It was the Senate Intelligence Committee, under Republican Chair Richard Burr, validating the work of the same agencies that Trump and his loyalists would later call the “deep state.”

The committee went further:

“In all the interviews of those who drafted and prepared the ICA, the Committee heard consistently that analysts were under no politically motivated pressure to reach specific conclusions.”
— Volume 4, p. 6

The report even tackled one of MAGA’s most beloved scapegoats, the Steele dossier, with surgical precision:

“The Committee found that the information provided by Christopher Steele to FBI was not used in the body of the ICA or to support any of its analytic judgments.”
— Volume 4, p. 7

This matters. It dismantles the fiction, resurrected in the 2025 DNI report, that the ICA was a partisan hit job or a politically orchestrated smear. There were disagreements, yes. But they were documented, debated, and ultimately respected. As the report clarifies, the final wording, including differences in confidence levels, was decided transparently by CIA Director John Brennan and NSA Director Admiral Michael Rogers, who independently affirmed they were not coerced.

This wasn’t a “deep state conspiracy.” It was intelligence work under democratic oversight, and the very people now claiming it was fraudulent once defended it when their political alignment demanded it.

2. The Attempted Rewrite: The 2025 DNI Memo and its Revisionist Claims

Authoritarian regimes rarely rewrite history outright; instead, they reshape its scaffolding, offering the illusion of revelation while repackaging old grievances as new truths. The July 2025 memo, “DIG Russia Hoax Memo and Timeline (Revisited),” issued under the auspices of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, attempts exactly that, not as an honest reevaluation of evidence, but as a calculated maneuver to cast doubt on a thoroughly vetted and bipartisan account of Russian interference in the 2016 election.

Let’s be clear: this memo is not an intelligence product in the traditional sense. It reads as an indictment, not of foreign adversaries, but of the intelligence community itself. From the opening pages, it begins not with measured analysis but with narrative framing:

“Key Intelligence Manipulated and Withheld from the American People by the IC”.

The accusatory language sets the tone: the intelligence agencies, we are told, suppressed evidence, sidelined whistleblowers, and fabricated consensus, all while the Obama administration orchestrated a conspiracy to delegitimize Donald Trump’s victory.

This is not a memo grounded in new data. It is a political document framed as grievance theater.

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The Central Claims of the 2025 Memo

The memo’s key assertions include:

• That a September 2016 Intelligence Community assessment found

“foreign adversaries do not have and will probably not obtain the capabilities to successfully execute widespread and undetected cyber attacks” on election infrastructure.

• That a December 2016 President’s Daily Brief (PDB) included the line

“we have no evidence of cyber manipulation of election infrastructure intended to alter results”,
but that this PDB was allegedly “killed” by intelligence leadership before it could be shared with the incoming Trump team.

• That the Steele Dossier was covertly relied upon in crafting the 2017 ICA, even after multiple agencies questioned its credibility.

These claims are built not on revelation, but on omission and distortion. For instance, the memo repeatedly implies that the absence of direct vote manipulation negates Russian interference altogether, a straw man argument that ignores the actual focus of the 2017 ICA and the 2020 Senate review: influence operations, not hacked ballots.

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What the Senate Actually Found

In contrast to this revisionist framing, Volume 4 of the 2020 Senate Intelligence Committee report, overseen by a Republican-led committee, delivers a methodical, bipartisan affirmation of the original ICA’s core judgments:

“The Committee found the ICA presents a coherent and well-constructed intelligence basis for the case of unprecedented Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.”

“In all the interviews of those who drafted and prepared the ICA, the Committee heard consistently that analysts were under no politically motivated pressure to reach specific conclusions.”

“The differing confidence levels on one analytic judgment are justified and properly represented.”

And perhaps most devastating to the 2025 narrative:

“The Committee found no reason to dispute the Intelligence Community’s conclusions.”

The report also makes clear that the Steele dossier played no role in the ICA’s analytic conclusions:

“The dossier was not used in the body of the ICA or to support any of its analytic judgments.”

These findings were the product of years of bipartisan scrutiny. The Senate interviewed 57 individuals, reviewed thousands of pages of documents, and examined the ICA’s tradecraft. And their conclusion was definitive: the ICA got it right.

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The Political Utility of Doubt

So what is the 2025 memo really doing?

It’s not exposing a hoax. It’s repackaging an old conspiracy theory into an official-looking document, dressed in the seal of the DNI to lend credibility to what amounts to political vengeance.

It doesn’t aim to correct history. It aims to weaponize it.

3. The Real Weaponization: Not by Biden, But by Trump

It’s one of the oldest tricks in the authoritarian playbook: accuse your opponent of what you’re planning to do.

For years, Donald Trump and his loyalists have insisted that the federal government , particularly under Joe Biden, has been “weaponized” against conservatives. It’s become a foundational myth of MAGA politics: that the DOJ is a leftist hit squad, the FBI is a partisan machine, and every indictment of Trump is proof that democracy itself has been hijacked.

But like most MAGA mantras, this isn’t argument. It’s projection.

And in 2025, that projection has metastasized into policy.

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How Conspiracy Becomes State Doctrine

The July 2025 memo from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, dissected in Section 2, wasn’t published in a vacuum. It was released alongside a growing chorus of public threats from Trump world figures, including Tulsi Gabbard, Pam Bondi, and Trump himself. The implication? That Barack Obama committed “treason.” That Fauci, Schiff, and others were preemptively pardoned because they knew they were guilty.

This isn’t just rhetorical theater anymore. It’s governance by grievance.

What we’re watching is not a legitimate attempt to revisit intelligence findings. It’s an authoritarian routine playing out in slow motion:

1. Invent a retroactive narrative of sabotage — in this case, the baseless claim that the Obama administration “rigged” the intelligence community to undermine Trump.

2. Repackage the narrative as new evidence — despite the fact that these claims were investigated and debunked by bipartisan reviews years ago.

3. Use the manufactured doubt to justify real-world retribution — criminal referrals, purges, and prosecutions dressed up as patriotism.

This is not an intelligence review. It’s an emotional vendetta, wrapped in the veneer of officialdom.

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Biden Had the Power, And Didn’t Use It

Contrast that with how Biden handled the transition of power and the investigations into January 6. For all the hysteria about “Biden’s DOJ,” the reality is far more restrained. Biden did not jail Trump. He did not order prosecutions. He did not purge political enemies from federal agencies. The cases brought against Trump, on classified documents, on state-level election interference, on civil fraud, were initiated by grand juries, independent prosecutors, and judges, many of whom were Trump-appointed.

Biden could have wielded the machinery of government against his predecessor. He didn’t.

Trump, on the other hand, promised his followers: “I am your retribution.”

Now he’s delivering.

Not by defending democracy, but by desecrating it.

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Projection Isn’t a Bug: It’s the Operating System

What we’re seeing now is the fulfillment of a MAGA pattern that’s been there from the beginning: accuse others of your own intent, then use that accusation to justify the action you wanted to take all along.

• Say Obama committed treason → fabricate a case to arrest him.

• Say Fauci orchestrated a hoax → retroactively criminalize science.

• Say the “deep state” controls everything → dismantle independence and centralize loyalty under Trump.

The 2025 memo isn’t about transparency. It’s about inversion.

It transforms fact into conspiracy and conspiracy into policy. It lays the groundwork for using state power not in defense of the Constitution, but in service to a man’s ego.

And that is the true weaponization of government: when the institutions designed to protect the people are slowly repurposed to protect one person from the truth.

4. Why MAGA Wants to Believe the 2025 Memo

It’s not surprising that MAGA clings to the 2025 memo like a sacred text. What’s surprising is how little it takes to convince them.

This isn’t about new evidence or careful reevaluation. The memo could’ve said anything, so long as it told the base what they already believe: that Trump was right, that the system was rigged, and that everyone who doubted him was part of the conspiracy.

The psychology behind this isn’t just partisan, it’s documented.

Political psychologist Bob Altemeyer spent decades studying authoritarian followers, and one consistent trait emerged: projection. Accuse your opponents of what you’re doing. Claim persecution while you dominate. Say the system is rigged, not because it is, but because that’s what you plan to do with it. MAGA doesn’t rage against authoritarianism; it rehearses it.

Another core mechanism is motivated reasoning. This means they don’t start with facts and work toward a conclusion, they start with the conclusion (“Trump is innocent, the deep state is real”) and then cherry-pick anything that seems to confirm it. Every indictment becomes persecution. Every failed impeachment becomes retroactive proof of innocence. Not because the facts support it, but because the emotional narrative does.

Then there’s system justification, flipped on its head. In classic political psychology, people justify the system they live under to feel stable and secure (Jost et al., 2003). But for MAGA, Trump becomes the system. He is the rightful order. He is the vessel of truth. So any challenge to him, legal, electoral, or factual, becomes an attack on the natural order of things. They’re not defending a democracy. They’re defending a throne.

And it’s not just personal. It’s tribal.

Collective narcissism, the belief that your group is special but underappreciated — helps explain why criticism of Trump feels like an attack on self. According to Golec de Zavala and Lantos (2020), people high in collective narcissism respond to symbolic threats with disproportionate hostility. When Trump is accused, they feel accused. When Trump is undermined, they feel erased. That’s why no amount of fact-checking matters. The facts aren’t attacking Trump. They’re attacking them.

So when a memo like the 2025 report comes out, no matter how partisan, how distorted, how thoroughly debunked by prior evidence, it’s embraced immediately. Not because it’s persuasive.

Because it’s necessary.

It fulfills the emotional logic that drives the MAGA worldview. It replaces contradiction with confirmation. And it lets them pretend, once again, that they are not just defending a man, but restoring a world where they were always right, and always the victim.

5. Why This Moment Matters

History isn’t just a record of what happened. It’s a battlefield over who gets to decide what counts as truth.

The July 2025 memo isn’t just a bureaucratic oddity. It’s a loaded weapon, retrofitted with the past to justify authoritarianism in the present. If we accept it without scrutiny, we hand MAGA a license to criminalize dissent in hindsight.

And that’s precisely the point.

Every authoritarian regime rewrites history. Not necessarily with outright lies, but with reframing, omitting context, elevating doubt, and dressing political vengeance as overdue justice. They don’t need to falsify every record. They only need to raise enough suspicion to justify what comes next.

This is what makes the 2025 DNI memo so dangerous. It doesn’t present new facts. It recycles old grievances. It positions debunked conspiracy theories as state-validated “discoveries.” And if left unchallenged, it becomes the scaffolding for a new national mythology: one in which Trump was the victim, the intelligence community was corrupt, and the real crime was investigating interference, not committing it.

MAGA now holds the levers of power. And the same people who howled for years about “deep state interference” are now openly using state power to punish political enemies. This isn’t irony. It’s inversion, and it’s deliberate.

The lesson here is not just about this report. It’s about what happens when lies are laundered through official channels and then enforced as law.

Because once a regime begins to rewrite its past, it’s already preparing to criminalize the future.

Conclusion: The Past Is the Battlefield

“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”
— George Orwell, 1984 (Part 1, Chapter 3)

The 2025 memo doesn’t just reinterpret history, it rewires it. It reshapes evidence into ideology, cloaking vengeance in the language of justice. But justice does not retroactively invent a crime to justify a punishment. Justice does not change its story to fit a new regime.

This is not a partisan warning. Even Reagan-era conservatives once understood the danger of executive abuse. On Aug. 6, 1974, at the regular Senate Republican Conference lunch, amid the Watergate crisis, Goldwater fumed: There are only so many lies you can take, and now there have been one too many.

That day has come again, only now, the lies are aimed at protecting the presidency, not bringing it down. And the target isn’t a single party. It’s truth itself.

Don’t let them convince you this is justice. It’s revenge.

References

Altemeyer, B. (2006). The Authoritarians. Retrieved from https://theauthoritarians.org

Golec de Zavala, A., & Lantos, D. (2020). Collective narcissism and its social consequences: The bad and the ugly. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 29(3), 273–278. https://doi.org/10.1177/0963721420917703

Jost, J. T., Banaji, M. R., & Nosek, B. A. (2004). A decade of system justification theory: Accumulated evidence of conscious and unconscious bolstering of the status quo. Political Psychology, 25(6), 881–919. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9221.2004.00402.x

Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. (2020). Report on Russian Active Measures Campaigns and Interference in the 2016 U.S. Election: Volume 4 – Review of the Intelligence Community Assessment. United States Senate. Retrieved from https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/documents/report_volume4.pdf

U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence. (2025, July). Obama conspiracy to subvert President Trump victory [DIG Russia Hoax Memo and Timeline (Revisited)]. Retrieved from https://www.dni.gov/index.php/newsroom/dig/4085-dig-obama-conspiracy-to-subvert-president-trump-victory

Orwell, G. (1949). 1984. London: Secker & Warburg.