By all appearances, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has been struggling for months. On Capitol Hill, she’s become the subject of bipartisan ridicule, with one Republican senator recently questioning whether she should be medicated.
In the White House, it’s worse. In recent months, there’s been reporting from major outlets about the intelligence chief being sidelined, being left out of important meetings, and falling out of favor in the Oval Office. Indeed, in the run-up to the president launching a pre-emptive military strike in Iran, Donald Trump twice told reporters — out loud and on camera — that he didn’t care what Gabbard thought.
If the DNI were looking for a way to return to the president’s good graces, she apparently found one. The New York Times reported:
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence on Friday issued the latest in a series of reports from the Trump administration attempting to undermine the eight-year-old assessment that Russia favored the election of Donald J. Trump in 2016. Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, said the information she was releasing showed a ‘treasonous conspiracy in 2016’ by top Obama administration officials to harm Mr. Trump.
Late Friday afternoon, Gabbard’s Director’s Initiative Group (DIG) unveiled a report with a title that read, “Declassified Evidence of Obama Administration Conspiracy to Subvert President Trump’s 2016 Victory and Presidency.” In an accompanying press release, the DNI added, “The information we are releasing today clearly shows there was a treasonous conspiracy in 2016 committed by officials at the highest level of our government.”
It was over-the-top nonsense that Gabbard was quick to bring to Fox News during multiple on-air appearances, including an interview in which she raised the prospect of an anti-Trump “coup.”
The president appeared delighted. I lost count of how many items he published to his social media platform about Gabbard’s claims, but The Daily Beast tallied “at least 17 times,” which sounds about right.
Those who apparently believe it’s their job to parrot Trump played their predictable roles. House Speaker Mike Johnson, for example, wrote online in response to the DNI’s findings, “DISMANTLING THE DEEP STATE! New evidence from [Gabbard] confirms what we’ve long known: The Russia hoax was a political hit job manufactured by Obama officials and weaponized by intel agencies to take down President Trump.”
And if that were true, it would certainly be a big deal. But it’s not true at all.
Right off the bat, it’s worth noting that the hapless intelligence director could have better timing: The week before she released her weird report, Trump’s handpicked CIA director released the findings of his own internal investigation that concluded, once again, that Russia attacked the U.S. political system in 2016 because Putin’s regime wanted to put Trump in the White House — which is the same thing special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation found, and which is the same thing the Senate Intelligence Committee found when it was led by then-Sen. Marco Rubio, before he became Trump’s secretary of state.
But even if we put that aside, and consider Gabbard’s findings on their own, the DNI released a document that can charitably be described as an embarrassment to herself, her office and the U.S. intelligence community. An analysis from The Bulwark explained, “[E]ven a cursory look at the actual substance of Gabbard’s dramatic claims shows … a nothingburger. 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.”
Similarly, Philip Bump, who spent years covering the underlying scandal at The Washington Post, described Gabbard’s conclusions as “ludicrous.”
Broadly speaking, there are two main points to Gabbard’s pitch. The first is that Democratic officials in the Obama administration somehow manufactured the entire Russia scandal after Trump defeated Hillary Clinton in the 2016 race, following a period in which the intelligence community was largely indifferent to Vladimir Putin’s tactics before. We already know that’s not true: Not only did administration officials warn Americans about Russian efforts weeks before Election Day, but those same officials famously brought their concerns to Congress, only to be brushed off by GOP leaders.
Gabbard focused heavily on the fact that the Obama White House sought a revised assessment the month after Trump’s electoral victory, and the changes that were made at this point. But as The Bulwark explained, “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.’ … Was this a new, post-election assessment, as Gabbard seems to claim? Hardly: The same conclusion was announced at the start of the October 7, 2016, joint statement issued by the DNI and the Department of Homeland Security on behalf of seventeen intelligence agencies.
All of this dovetails with the second problem with Gabbard’s findings: The DNI leaned heavily into the fact that there was no evidence of Russia targeting U.S. vote-counting machines and election infrastructure. That’s true, but it’s also irrelevant: Democratic officials never claimed that Russia targeted U.S. vote-counting machines and election infrastructure.
Looking ahead, the fact that Gabbard released a pitiful report might seem unimportant. The DNI already lacked credibility, so the fact that her findings make her appear like an even more brazen partisan activist will strike some as trivial.
But Gabbard has also spent the last three days claiming that she’s now pushing for “indictments” and “prosecutions” of Obama administration officials who committed outrageous crimes that don’t appear to have actually happened in reality.
In other words, the release of a misguided report on Trump’s Russia scandal wasn’t just a desperate ploy to make the president happy; it was also an apparent first step toward pushing the Justice Department to act on a silly partisan stunt.
This article was originally published on MSNBC.com
