Washington, July 24 (AP): Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard declassified materials this month, claiming they demonstrated a “treasonous conspiracy” by the Obama administration in 2016. She alleged that the administration politicized US intelligence to cast doubt on Donald Trump's election victory legitimacy.
Gabbard pointed to newly declassified emails from Obama-era officials and a five-year-old classified House report. Her aim was to challenge the intelligence community's conclusion that Russian President Vladimir Putin sought to support Trump and discredit his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton.
The events surrounding Russia's activities during the 2016 election are among the most scrutinized in recent history. The Kremlin's involvement and the subsequent US response were the focus of at least five major investigations: the Republican-led House and Senate intelligence committees, two Justice Department special counsels, and the department's inspector general.
These investigations concluded—or accepted the conclusion—that Russia conducted a campaign to interfere in the election via social media and hacked material.
The House-led probe, run by Trump allies, agreed that Russia executed an election interference campaign, although it claimed the aim was to create chaos in the US rather than to benefit Trump. While several reports criticized actions by Obama administration officials, particularly at the FBI, they did not dispute that Moscow aimed to interfere with the election.
The Associated Press reviewed these reports to assess Gabbard's claims: Russian Election Interference
CLAIM: “The intelligence community had one assessment: that Russia did not have the intent and capability to try to impact the outcome of the US election leading up to Election Day. The same assessment was made after the election.” — Gabbard to Fox News on Tuesday.
The documents Gabbard released do not validate her claim. She references a few 2016 emails in which officials conclude Russia had no intention of manipulating the US vote count via cyberattacks on voting systems.
President Barack Obama's administration never suggested that voting infrastructure was tampered with. Instead, they stated Russia ran a covert influence campaign using hacked and stolen material from prominent Democrats.
Russian operatives leveraged this information in state-funded media and social media operations to rile US public opinion. More than two dozen Russians were indicted in 2018 for these efforts. Republican-led investigations in Congress affirmed this conclusion, and the emails Gabbard released don't contradict this finding.
Shift in Assessment?CLAIM: “There was a shift, a 180-degree shift, from the intelligence community's assessment leading up to the election to the one that President Obama directed be produced after Donald Trump won the election that completely contradicted those assessments that had come previously.” — Gabbard to Fox News on Tuesday.
There was no shift.
The emails Gabbard released show a Department of Homeland Security official in August 2016 told then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper there was “no indication of a Russian threat to directly manipulate the actual vote count.”
The public assessment released by the Obama administration in January 2017 reached the same conclusion: “DHS assesses that the types of systems Russian actors targeted or compromised were not involved in vote tallying."
Putin's IntentCLAIM: The Obama administration "manufactured the January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment that they knew was false promoting the LIE that Vladimir Putin and the Russian government helped President Trump win the 2016 election.” — Gabbard on Truth Social Wednesday.
The newly declassified material reveals some dissent within the intelligence community about whether Putin's goal was to assist Trump or merely disrupt US public stability. This debate also led to partisan divisions on the House Intelligence panel examining the issue several years later.
Gabbard's memo, released last week, cites a “whistleblower” from the intelligence community who is quoted saying they could not “concur in good conscience” with the judgment that Russia had a “decisive preference” for Trump.
Such debates are not uncommon in drafting intelligence reports. The Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee found no political interference from the Obama administration and reported that all analysts felt free to debate, object to content, and assess confidence levels as is standard.
In 2018, Putin directly addressed whether he preferred Trump at a Helsinki press conference, even as he sidestepped whether he directed assistance to Trump. “Yes, I did,” Putin stated, citing Trump's intent to normalize US-Russia relations.
Steele DossierCLAIM: “They used already discredited information like the Steele dossier — they knew it was discredited at the time.” — Gabbard to Fox News on Tuesday.
The dossier refers to opposition research compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele, funded by Democrats during the 2016 election. It included unverified tips and salacious gossip about Trump's Russia ties, though its importance to the Russia investigation can be exaggerated.
The Steele dossier was not the basis for the FBI's July 2016 decision to investigate potential coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia, as found by the Justice Department's inspector general.
Some records released by Gabbard show that the CIA relied primarily on a human source close to the Kremlin for its conclusion that Putin aimed to help Trump, not the Steele dossier.
FBI agents did not access the dossier until weeks into their inquiry. Nevertheless, Trump supporters have used the document's unverified content to challenge the broader Russia investigation. Many of Steele’s claims have since been discredited or denied.
However, it is true that the FBI and Justice Department partly relied on the Steele dossier to secure surveillance warrants to monitor communications of a former Trump campaign adviser. FBI agents continued seeking those warrants even amid credibility doubts about Steele’s reporting.
The dossier was also summarized—against then-CIA Director John Brennan’s objections—in a two-page annex to the classified version of the Intelligence Community Assessment.
(AP) GRS GRS
(Only the headline of this report may have been reworked by Editorji; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)