As former Chief of Staff to the Director of National Intelligence, I watched the Intelligence Community confront what was done to a duly elected president. We declassified the documents. We laid out the evidence of the Obama administration’s coordinated effort to manufacture and politicize intelligence after the 2016 election, contradicting prior assessments, elevating discredited material, and setting in motion a years-long campaign to destabilize Donald Trump’s victory and presidency.

The Russia hoax was not an error. It was a playbook: selective intelligence, anonymous “national security officials,” breathless media amplification, and the steady erosion of trust in democratic outcomes when their preferred candidate loses.

This should sound familiar to everyone who isn’t willfully ignorant about the attempted coup that the Obama administration orchestrated against President Trump.

The first example is the Steele Dossier.

In declassified documents released by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) last year, it showed how the Biden administration’s DOJ, FBI, and Intelligence Community heavily relied on the debunked opposition research paid for by Hillary Clinton’s campaign to go after Donald Trump, his aides, and his family. They put the highest classification marks on it, although it was all unclassified, leaked it to Democrats in Congress and the media, who then ran headlines saying the president and his campaign were compromised.

And what was the Steele Dossier also used for? The FISA application on Carter Page, which was approved to activate surveillance on him.

Next was the 2020 Hunter Biden laptop letter.

Former “ex-national security” officials said the material had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” That was debunked, but not until the damage was done.

Now the same playbook is being run again, in the open, on recordings, and with the same media providing cover.

Data Republican found and released videos of former USAID employees, ex-national security officials, and aligned NGO operatives discussing how to force protective actions so that the federal government can be declared illegitimate.

This is more than talk. They describe using color revolution tactics: create or amplify disorder, pressure governors and mayors into refusal or resistance, coordinate through networks of protest groups and “democracy” organizations, and condition the public to accept that the elected government itself is the threat.

The discussions include red lines that treat almost any effective federal pushback as proof of illegitimacy. National Security Leaders for America and related structures appear in the operational picture. Just like we did at ODNI with the Russia hoax, we released emails and documents for the American people to read; you can do the same with these.

One of the key figures Data Republican exposed is part of the same network that helped drive the “illegal orders” messaging against Secretary of War Pete Hegseth and aligned with the Seditious Six, who told our military to disobey orders. This includes Senator Elissa Slotkin, a former CIA analyst, who recently went viral for saying she wants to prosecute the Trump administration to scare young conservatives so they won’t run for office, express their views, or get politically involved.

It is always the same people, running the same network, executing the same playbook.

That is why President Trump’s dismantling of USAID is a huge victory. The agency’s alumni network is deeply embedded in this effort. Cutting off that institutional pipeline was a direct strike against the infrastructure Deep State actors rely on.

The plotters are clearly rattled that their planning has been exposed. So they did what those determined to overturn the electoral choices of the American people always do: they ran to a friendly outlet and secured a puff piece designed to run top cover and blame Trump.

If you read the Washington Post piece, it does not describe a conspiracy to declare the federal government illegitimate or rewrite the constitutional order. It describes a group of well-meaning, patriotic, anonymous ex-national security officials simply trying to protect America from the supposedly authoritarian Trump destroying “our democracy.”

That framing is itself a classic color-revolution tactic: propaganda engineered to condition the public to accept illegitimate actions as necessary defense. The Washington Post is not covering the story. It is participating in the operation.

During my time at ODNI, at the direction of the president, we released Intelligence Community documents showing how assessments that Russia had not altered the 2016 election outcome via cyberattacks on infrastructure were sidelined, how a new Intelligence Community Assessment was ordered after a White House principals meeting, and how discredited information was elevated while internal dissent was suppressed and punished.

This is the same media that treated every anonymous leak as gospel, then treated every subsequent correction or contrary finding as partisan noise.

They are doing it again. The “ex-national security officials” are once more cast as the adults in the room, and anyone pointing to the actual planning is the conspiracy theorist.

The pattern is not subtle. It is the same playbook, the same media protection, and the same willingness to treat democratic outcomes as provisional when their power is at stake. The republic does not survive if that becomes normalized.

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Alexa Henning is a former Chief of Staff at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and former White House Director of Broadcast Media for President Trump. She also served as Communications Director for Senator Ron Johnson and Arkansas Governor Sarah Sanders.

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Inside The Bureaucratic Coup To Destabilize The Trump Administration