Mother Jones
Tulsi Gabbard’s Dangerous Disinformation Campaign Against America
The Trump administration has launched a war on former Obama administration officials, and to do so, it has engaged in one of the most egregious and obvious acts of politicizing intelligence in decades.
On Friday, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard released formerly classified US intelligence reports about the 2016 election that she said were evidence of an Obamaadministration “conspiracy to subvert President Trump’s 2016 victory and presidency.” In a hysterical press release, she accused former President Barack Obama and his national security aides of having “manufactured and politicized intelligence to lay the ground for what was essentially a years-long coup against President Trump.” Describingthis as a “treasonous” plot, shesaid she was forwarding documents to the Justice Department, presumably toinitiate a criminal investigation. Naturally, she went on Fox News to amplify her allegations against Obama and his advisers.
It’s all a fabrication. What’s worse, her skullduggery appears to have been the catalyst for one of PresidentDonald Trump’s most disturbing and dangerous social media posts: An AI-generated video of Obama in the Oval Office visiting a smiling Trump, being manhandled and arrested by FBI agents, and then tossed into a prison cell.
Gabbard claims that the Obama administration and its top national security officials schemed to create and promote a phony intelligence finding to undermine Trump. On January 6, 2017, two weeks before Trump was to begin his first term as president, the intelligence community released an assessment (called an ICA) that stated Russia had attacked the 2016 election with a covert hack-and-leak operation and a secret social media campaign designedto sow political discord in the United States, harm Hillary Clinton’s chances, and help Trump win. Ever since, Trump has called the Russia story a “hoax” and each of the subsequent investigations a “witch hunt.”
Gabbard, acting muchlike a Soviet commissar, is trying to disappear that assessment and the taint it applies to Trump’s 2016 victory.So on Friday, she released over 100 pages of documents that she insists show that the ICA was concocted to purposefully present the false finding to the public. But she is engaging in a sleazy sleight of hand.
Gabbard offers her case in an 11-page memo that quotes excerpts of intelligence records from 2016. The first one is an August 16 document that was sent to James Clapper, then occupying the position Gabbard now has asthe director of national intelligence. It said, “There is no indication of a Russian threat to directly manipulate the actual vote count through cyber means.” A September 9 record cites an intelligence official observing, “Russia probably is not trying to going to be able to influence the election by using cyber means to manipulate computer-enabled election infrastructure.” A September 12 assessment published by the intelligence community noted, “[F]oreign adversaries do not have and will probably not obtain the capabilities to successfully execute widespread and undetected cyber attacks on the diverse set of information technologies and infrastructures used to support the November 2016 presidential election.”
Following the election, Gabbard’s memo points out, DNI Clapper’s office concluded, “Foreign adversaries did not use cyberattacks on election infrastructure to alter the US Presidential election outcome.”
Gabbard then delivers the j’accuse moment of this memo: The ICA, which was produced on Obama’s order, said Russia had waged a clandestine operation to influence the operation, even though this previous intelligence reported “Russia lacked intent and capability to hack the 2016 election” and did not impact the election through cyber hacks on the election.”
This proves, she says, that the ICA was “politicized intelligence that was used as the basis for countless smears seeking to delegitimize President Trump’s victory, the years-long Mueller investigation, two Congressional impeachments, high-level officials being investigated, arrested, and thrown in jail, heightened US-Russia tensions, and more.”
The ICA was not the basis for the FBI investigation, which began months earlier and eventually morphed into the Mueller probe. Nor did it trigger the first or second impeachment of Trump. More importantly, Gabbard is deliberately misleading the public about the intelligence she cites.
The ICA’s finding that Russia had clandestinely interfered in the election to assist Trump was a separate matter from anotherconcern of the intelligence community: the possibility that Russian operatives would monkey-wrench vote-counting systems and throw Election Day into chaos.
That had been a worry for the Obama administration throughout 2016, after it received reports that Russian intelligence had penetrated and probed election boards in several states. The prospect of a Russian cyber-attack on the election system was the subject of intense intelligence reporting and analysis, and, as the documents Gabbard released indicate, the intelligence community came to believe that Russia would not be able to rig election results. The ICA reported this, noting that the Department of Homeland Security had assessed “that the types of systems we observed Russian actors targeting or compromising are not involved in vote tallying.”
Yet in this memo, Gabbard applies intelligence reporting on the potential election tampering to an entirely separate issue: the Russian attack that included the operation that hacked Democratic targets and released their emails to impede the Clinton campaign, and that ran an influence operation through secret social media efforts to denigrate Clinton and boost Trump. These are twodifferent matters. The conclusion that Russian cyber operatives were unlikely to impact the electoral infrastructure is unrelated to the assessment that the Russians were seeking to sabotage the campaign through covert action and a clandestine social media propaganda campaign.
The person in charge of overseeing the US intelligence community ought to know this.
Gabbard is engaging in blatant cherry-picking and gaslighting. And she’s being sloppy with her subterfuge. Her case is easy to debunk. The intelligence reporting she cites does not contradict the ICA and does not indicate there was a high-level plot to produce a bogus report to damage Trump. She is providing a phony and weak cover story, both for Trump and Vladimir Putin. After all, long after the ICA was produced, the Mueller report and two congressional investigations confirmed that the Russians had assaulted the 2016 election, facts that Gabbardneglects to mention in her memo.
When it comes to perilous conspiring, Gabbard is the guilty one, especially when she suggests that Obama and his aides broke the law. Her moves follow similar conniving by CIA director John Ratcliffe, who recently released a sketchy report attacking the ICA and referred former CIA director John Brennan and former FBI Director Jim Comey to the Justice Department for criminal investigations.
Ultimately, this is about rewriting history to serve Dear Leader and seeking vengeance on his behalf against those who dared investigate the Russian effort to help himreach the White House—an effort Trumpaided by denying its existence. These endeavors to pervert intelligence demonstratethat the nation’s spy services are being led by lackeys subservient to an autocrat who places his own interests above responsible concerns for national security. But they also supply fodder for Trump’s never-ending and treacherous campaign to demonize his political foes and brand them as traitorous criminals who deserve to rot in prison. An intelligence community that serves a president and not the truth is a threat to the republic—especially when that president yearns to be an authoritarian.
Spy services often conduct clandestine disinformation operations. These are supposed to target adversaries overseas. To prove her loyalty to Trump, Gabbard is running adevious disinfo op, this one against the American public.