President Donald Trump’s intelligence chief has issued new allegations against Barack Obama and his high-ranking administration officials related to the “Russiagate” investigation, but a conservative columnist said those claims are crumbling under the least bit of scrutiny.
Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, claimed Friday that Obama’s intel community “manipulated and withheld” key evidence in the investigation into Russia’s efforts to meddle in the 2016 election on behalf of Trump, and she called for the prosecution of former FBI director James Comey, CIA director John Brennan, and DNI James Clapper for “treasonous conspiracy.”
But The Bulwark’s Cathy Young said her allegations were bogus.
“Even a cursory look at the actual substance of Gabbard’s dramatic claims shows . . . a nothingburger,” Young wrote. “There is no actual substance. Instead, there is blatant sleight of hand and manipulation of evidence, debunking a theory of Russian election interference that the Obama administration never endorsed.”
Gabbard claims that intelligence assessments in the fall of 2016 found Russia “did not use cyberattacks” to alter the election’s outcome, but she says that Obama, Brennan and Clapper ordered the creation of a new assessment accusing the Kremlin of election meddling that fueled media reports that Vladimir Putin had been personally involved in the effort.
“If true, that would indeed be outrageous,” Young wrote. “But this supposed scandal rests on a crude bait-and-switch. A quick look at the media reports Gabbard cites shows that they weren’t talking about altering the election outcome through ‘cyberattacks on election infrastructure”’ — that is, actual tampering with the vote count. Rather, the claims of election interference via cyber warfare concerned, as the Washington Post put it, ‘individuals with connections to the Russian government who provided WikiLeaks with thousands of hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee and others, including Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman.’”
Young argued that Gabbard’s memo is merely “smoke and mirrors” and said her allegations boosted both MAGA and Kremlin narratives.
“For what it’s worth, even the Gabbard memo is compelled to admit that there is ‘supporting evidence indicating the Russian government directed hacking of the DNC and [Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee],’” Young wrote. “But the memo omits another key fact. Obama’s decision to order a review of the evidence of Russian hacking in early December 2016 wasn’t some bizarre whim explicable only by a plot to sabotage his Republican successor by portraying him as a Kremlin puppet. Obama was under strong pressure from congressional Democrats to open a probe into Russian election meddling after briefings from intelligence and law enforcement, and Senate Republicans were talking about launching their own investigation.”
“President-elect Trump’s stubborn insistence that he saw no reason to believe there had been any Russian interference at all added to the urgency of completing the review before his inauguration,” she added.
Nothing in Gabbard’s memo disputes a 2020 bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee report, which found that Kremlin operatives did interfere in the election and Trump campaign officials actively worked through contacts with WikiLeaks to capitalize on materials hacked by Russia, and while Trump himself may not have known about those contacts he certainly hyped those materials.
“If anyone still had doubts that Gabbard is a bad actor, installed in her present job with the purpose of corrupting U.S. intelligence and turning it into a tool of Trump’s personal agendas and vendettas, the Russiagate report should put those doubts to rest,” Young wrote. “Was the timing of her memo meant as a distraction from the scandal around Trump’s connections with Jeffrey Epstein? Hard to say; it was probably being prepared before the Epstein story catapulted back into the news.”
“What’s clear is that it boosts not only the MAGA narrative of Trump as victim of the ‘deep state’ — a convenient excuse for Trump’s moves to purge and MAGAfy intelligence agencies — but also the narrative of Trump as victim of a ‘coup,’ inverting the reality of the attempt to steal the 2020 election,” she added.