Rep. Jason Crow on Sunday said Tulsi Gabbard has turned herself into a “weapon of mass destruction” in an effort to regain President Donald Trump’s favor after he appeared to dismiss the director of national intelligence.
In an interview with Shannon Bream on “Fox News Sunday,” the Colorado Democrat said Gabbard’s recent accusation that former President Barack Obama manipulated information and “knowingly lied” about Russian efforts to sway the 2016 election would be “sad if they weren’t so dangerous.”
“She’s trying to curry favor and get back into favor with Donald Trump and has concocted these theories to do so,” Crow said, adding that Gabbard has not provided any new information with her claims.
“There have been four investigations including a bipartisan Senate investigation led under the first Trump administration in part by Marco Rubio that is very clear on these findings,” he said, referencing Trump’s secretary of state. “These have been investigated and reinvestigated and reinvestigated and nothing has changed up until this past month.”
Last week, Gabbard claimed newly declassified documents revealed “irrefutable evidence” that Obama and his national security team created an intelligence community assessment “that they knew was false” about Russian intervention in the 2016 presidential election. She and Trump said Obama’s actions could amount to treason.
All sides concede that Russia sought to undermine the election and that Vladimir Putin’s government did not succeed in altering vote totals or actual results. The unresolved issue surrounds the question of whether an Obama administration report ignored contrary evidence in offering an intelligence assessment that the Russians preferred that Donald Trump win; Crow claimed that the conclusion was reasonable within the normal give-and-take of intelligence work.
Obama officials have labeled the Gabbard claims of treason “ridiculous,” while Democrats in Congress have accused the administration of trying to distract from the ongoing frustration around the withholding of information regarding the disgraced financier and convicted sexual offender Jeffrey Epstein.
“Let’s be really clear again about what’s happening here. This is being reinvigorated and concocted because Donald Trump doesn’t want to talk about the Epstein files,” Crow said Sunday.
Republicans have denied the accusations, instead calling for a full investigation into Obama and the intelligence community leaders under him.
Rep. Rick Crawford (R-Ark.), who spoke to Bream on Sunday shortly after Crow, said the information Gabbard released had been hidden from Republicans for years.
“We have been trying for eight years to get our work product released back where it belongs, and we just got it,” Crawford, chair of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, said. He added that Republicans “are trying to reinstill trust with the American people.”
Crawford on Sunday claimed the Hillary Clinton campaign “bought and paid for” the Steele dossier, a controversial report that linked Trump to the Kremlin in 2016. He then called for former CIA chief John Brennan to be brought before Congress once again.
“I’m hopeful in fact that Brennan will be called in to testify under oath, and we will see if his story stays the same,” Crawford said before claiming Brennan had previously lied under oath when questioned about 2016 election interference.
Crow on Sunday called the focus on the dossier a “red herring.”
