President Donald Trump’s top intelligence official appeared in the White House briefing room Wednesday to level allegations no U.S. spy chief has ever made against a former president or administration.
National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard accused former President Barack Obama and his deputies of manufacturing a “false” intelligence analysis to show Russia tried to help Donald Trump win the 2016 election.
Obama and former officials in his administration have dismissed the allegations as baseless. “These bizarre allegations are ridiculous and a weak attempt at distraction,” Obama spokesperson Patrick Rodenbush said.
Democrats have accused the administration of trying to change the subject as many of Trump’s supporters have demanded the government release more documents and information related to the case of the late financier Jeffrey Epstein.
Leaders of the country’s intelligence agencies have tended to keep a low public profile and to steer clear of explicitly partisan broadsides, much less insinuate that a former president may have engaged in a criminal conspiracy.
But Gabbard, serving a commander in chief who has relished conspiracy theories and insisted he was the victim of a partisan plot, ventured into uncharted territory in her White House appearance.
“There is irrefutable evidence that details how President Obama and his national security team directed the creation of an intelligence community assessment that they knew was false,” said Gabbard, a former Democratic congresswoman.
Gabbard announced she had declassified a five-year-old report by Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee about the 2016 election. The Republican report was emphatically rejected at the time by Democratic lawmakers on the panel who played no role in its creation.
The Republican report sought to cast doubt on an assessment by U.S. intelligence agencies that Russia interfered in the 2016 election in a bid to boost Trump’s candidacy. The Republican report found that the bulk of the 2017 intelligence assessment — which assessed that Russia interfered in the 2016 election to damage Hillary Clinton’s candidacy — was “sound.”
But it took issue with the assessment’s finding that Russian President Vladimir Putin “aspired” to help Trump win the 2016 election. The House report argued that the intelligence agencies’ judgment was based on one piece of human intelligence that was open to different interpretations. The report added that some CIA officers objected to including the judgment about Putin’s intentions, arguing that the intelligence behind it was insufficient.
The House committee report also accused the director of the CIA at the time, John Brennan, of pushing to keep the finding about Putin in the assessment.
Bipartisan Senate report
Gabbard focused on the Republican House report, but a bipartisan Senate probe released the same year reached a different conclusion.
The 2020 Senate investigation, which spanned three years, involved more than 200 witnesses and reviewed more than a million documents, endorsed the intelligence agencies’ assessment that Russia had spread disinformation online and leaked stolen emails from the Democratic National Committee to undermine Clinton’s candidacy and bolster Trump’s prospects.
Trump’s current secretary of state, Marco Rubio, was the acting chair of the Intelligence Committee at the time. He and every other member of the committee, both Republicans and Democrats, endorsed the report’s findings.
Gabbard’s decision to declassify an old Republican congressional report is the latest in a series of actions by the administration designed to reopen a politically polarized debate about what happened in the 2016 election and whether Trump benefited from Moscow’s information warfare.
Satisfying neither side
The intelligence community’s analysis of the 2016 election and subsequent government investigations have never satisfied either side of the American political divide.
Intelligence agencies never delivered a verdict about the possible impact of Russia’s influence operations on the electoral outcome, and a probe by special counsel Robert Mueller found that Russia intervened in 2016 to undercut Clinton. But it did not find evidence of a criminal conspiracy between the Trump team and the Kremlin, as some voices on the left had suggested.
At the same time, a special counsel Trump appointed in his first term, John Durham, disappointed activists on the political right with his three-year investigation. Durham reported finding no criminal conspiracy among Obama administration officials to fabricate intelligence about Russia’s operations and filed no charges against the CIA officers who oversaw the 2017 assessment.
Democrats said Gabbard’s decision to declassify the Republican House report could put sensitive sources on Russia at risk.
“It seems as though the Trump administration is willing to declassify anything and everything except the Epstein files,” Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, the Democratic vice chair of the Intelligence Committee, said in a statement. “The desperate and irresponsible release of the partisan House intelligence report puts at risk some of the most sensitive sources and methods our Intelligence Community uses to spy on Russia.”
In her presentation at the White House, Gabbard publicly described detailed Russian intelligence reporting on Clinton, including allegations about her behavior and health that had not been verified.
Gabbard then blasted Obama administration officials for including an unverified dossier about Trump by a former British intelligence officer, Christopher Steele, in the 2017 intelligence assessment. The dossier was included in the assessment’s annex with a disclaimer that said its claims had not been verified.
Rep. Jim Himes, D-Conn., ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, called Gabbard’s claims “a transparent effort to distract from bipartisan criticism of the Trump Administration’s refusal to release the Jeffrey Epstein files.”
Himes added, though, that Gabbard had crossed a dangerous new rhetorical line. “As part of her effort to rewrite history,” he said in a statement, “she has accused President Obama and other former officials of engaging in a conspiracy to commit treason—a claim as dangerous as it is baseless.”