Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard called for several Obama administration officials to face criminal prosecution for participating in a “treasonous conspiracy” surrounding the 2016 election on Friday afternoon, the latest example of the Trump administration targeting critics of the president.
In a newly declassified report, Gabbard on Friday alleged the officials “manipulated and withheld” key intelligence from the public related to the possibility of Russian interference in the election.
In a Friday afternoon statement, Gabbard said she would provide all related documents to the Justice Department “to deliver the accountability that President [Donald] Trump, his family, and the American people deserve.”
“No matter how powerful, every person involved in this conspiracy must be investigated and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, to ensure nothing like this ever happens again,” Gabbard said in the statement.
The DOJ declined to comment on Gabbard’s comments.
The ODNI’s memo names former DNI James Clapper, former CIA Director John Brennan and former FBI Director James Comey, among others allegedly involved in the White House’s review of possible Russian meddling in the election.
The administration has routinely targeted critics of the president and has sought to relitigate the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections. The president has repeatedly criticized former intelligence officials for their efforts to probe the Kremlin’s possible attempts to interfere in American politics, with Trump accusing Comey of leading a “corrupt and vicious witch hunt” against him.
He has stripped security clearances of prominent Obama and Biden era officials, and has long promised investigations into public figures he views as enemies. In April, he ordered an investigation into Christopher Krebs, who ran Trump’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency during his first term and prominently pushed back against Trump’s stolen 2020 election mythology.
Clapper, Brennan and Comey did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Gabbard’s Friday report centers on intelligence that “foreign adversaries did not use cyberattacks on election infrastructure to alter the US Presidential election outcome” in an attempt to discredit larger investigations into and warnings about Russian meddling in the 2016 election.
Obama-era officials said shortly after the 2016 election that there was no credible evidence of voting totals being manipulated, even as a third-party candidate filed for recounts in swing states.
Marc Elias, a powerful Democratic attorney who represented Hillary Clinton’s campaign in 2016, said in response to the recount then that the campaign “had not uncovered any actionable evidence of hacking or outside attempts to alter the voting technology.”
Rep. Jim Himes (D-Conn.) accused Gabbard of “rehashing decade-old false claims about the Obama Administration” in an attempt to “change the subject” in a Friday afternoon statement.
“Baseless accusations of treason are unfortunately par for the course for this Director of National Intelligence, but that doesn’t make them any less damaging and unacceptable,” Himes said. “The IC leaders in 2016 understood that they took an oath to the Constitution, not President Trump. I wish Director Gabbard could say the same.”
Himes pointed to a report produced by the Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee during the first Trump administration, which is regarded to be the most thorough publicly available account of Moscow’s attempts to sway the election and the Trump campaign’s contacts with Russian officials.
The committee’s three-year investigation concluded that the Kremlin waged an aggressive effort to interfere in the 2016 presidential election.
While it found that the Trump campaign team’s contacts with Russian officials presented a “grave” counterintelligence threat, the bipartisan committee report did not reach a conclusion either way as to whether the president’s allies had knowingly colluded with Moscow to boost his chances in the polls.
The report was endorsed at the time by then-Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), now Trump’s secretary of State, who served as acting chair of the Senate Intelligence panel when the final volume of its report was released.
A recent review commissioned by CIA Director John Ratcliffe was critical of how the agency came to the conclusion that Russia sought to interfere in the 2016 election in favor of the Trump campaign, but ultimately did not question the intelligence community’s assessment.
Kyle Cheney contributed to this report.
