WASHINGTON (AP) — Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard this month declassified material that she claimed proved a “treasonous conspiracy” by the Obama administration in 2016 to politicize U.S. intelligence in service of casting doubt on the legitimacy of Donald Trump’s election victory.
As evidence, Gabbard cited newly declassified emails from Obama officials and a five-year-old classified House report in hopes of undermining the intelligence community’s conclusion that Russian President Vladimir Putin wanted to boost Trump and denigrate his Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton.
Russia’s activities during the 2016 election remain some of the most examined events in recent history. The Kremlin’s campaign and the subsequent U.S. government response were the subject of at least five major investigations by the Republican-led House and Senate intelligence committee; two Justice Department special counsels; and the department’s inspector general.
Those investigations either concluded — or accepted the conclusion — that Russia embarked on a campaign to interfere in the election through the use of social media and hacked material.
The House-led probe, conducted by Trump allies, also concurred that Russia ran an election interference campaign but said the purpose was to sow chaos in the U.S. rather than boost Trump. Several of the reports criticize the actions of Obama administration officials, particularly at the FBI, but do not dispute the fundamental findings that Moscow sought to interfere in the election.
The Associated Press has reviewed those reports to evaluate how Gabbard’s claims stack up:
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 U.S. 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 support her claim. She cites a handful of emails from 2016 in which officials conclude that Russia had no intention of manipulating the U.S. vote count through cyberattacks on voting systems.
President Barack Obama’s administration never alleged that voting infrastructure was tampered with. Rather, the administration said Russia ran a covert influence campaign using hacked and stolen material from prominent Democrats. Russian operatives then used that information as part of state-funded media and social media operations to inflame U.S. public opinion. More than two dozen Russians were indicted in 2018 in connection with those efforts.
Republican-led investigations in Congress have affirmed that conclusion, and the emails that Gabbard released do not contradict that 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 that 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 the Obama administration made public 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 intent
CLAIM: 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 material declassified this week reveals some dissent within the intelligence community about whether Putin wanted to help Trump or simply inflame the U.S. public. That same question led to a partisan divide on the House Intelligence panel when it examined the matter several years later.
Gabbard’s memo released last week cites a “whistleblower” who she says served in the intelligence community at the time and who is quoted as saying that he could not “concur in good conscience” with the intelligence community’s judgment that Russia had a “decisive preference” for Trump.
Such dissent and debate are not unusual in the drafting of intelligence reports. The Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee examined whether there was any political interference in the Obama administration’s conclusions and reported that “all analysts expressed that they were free to debate, object to content, and assess confidence levels, as is normal and proper.”
In 2018, Putin directly addressed the question of whether he preferred Trump at a press conference in Helsinki even as he sidestepped a question about whether he directed any of his subordinates to help Trump.
“Yes, I did,” Putin said. “Because he talked about bringing the U.S.-Russia relationship back to normal.”
Steele dossier
CLAIM: “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 a collection of opposition research files compiled by a former British spy, Christopher Steele, whose work was funded by Democrats during the 2016 election.
Those files included uncorroborated tips and salacious gossip about Trump’s ties to Russia, but the importance to the Russia investigation has sometimes been overstated.
It was not the basis for the FBI’s decision to open an investigation in July 2016 into potential coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia, the Justice Department’s inspector general found. Some of the records released by Gabbard this week also reveal that it was a Central Intelligence Agency human source close to the Kremlin that the agency primarily relied on for its conclusion that Putin wanted to help Trump and hurt Clinton, not the Steele dossier.
FBI agents on the case didn’t even come to possess the dossier until weeks into their inquiry. Even so, Trump supporters have seized on the unverified innuendo in the document to undercut the broader Russia investigation. Many of Steele’s claims have since been discredited or denied.
It is true, however, that the FBI and Justice Department relied in part on the Steele dossier to obtain surveillance warrants to eavesdrop on the communications of a former Trump campaign adviser, the inspector general found. FBI agents continued to pursue those warrants even after questions arose about the credibility of Steele’s reporting.
The dossier was also summarized — over the objections of then-CIA Director John Brennan, he has said — in a two-page annex to the classified version of the intelligence community assessment.
