Tulsi Gabbard’s hits just keep on comin’, don’t they?

On Wednesday, Gabbard — who might just be the most consequential director of national intelligence in modern times — showed up at the White House Press Corps briefing and delivered a second round of disclosures to follow the fusillade of Russiagate documents she let fly on Friday of last week.

Gabbard is doubling down on something everyone knows is true but half of political America doesn’t want to admit — namely, that there was never anything real about the accusations Donald Trump was a puppet of Russian strongman Vladimir Putin. In fact, something closer to the opposite is true, and that’s what the second round of Gabbard’s declassified intel shows.

1. We Dodged a Large, Fast-Moving Bullet in 2016

Per Gabbard, Putin was happy to sow chaos, to the extent he could, in the U.S. election that year. But it doesn’t appear that he really cared who won, and in fact the Russians were looking forward to advantages they expected to have were President Hillary to have come into being.

Which everyone, and especially the Russians, from what it seems, thought would happen.

What advantages? Well, that she was deeply compromised physically and mentally:

As of September 2016, the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) had Democratic National Committee (DNC) information that President Obama and party leaders found the state of Secretary Clinton’s health to be “extraordinarily alarming” and felt it could have “serious negative impact” on her election prospects. Her health information was being kept in “strictest secrecy,” and even close advisors were not being fully informed.

The SVR possessed DNC communications that Clinton was suffering from “intensified psycho-emotional problems, including uncontrolled fits of anger, aggression, and cheerfulness.” Clinton was placed on a daily regimen of “heavy tranquilizers,” and while afraid of losing, she remained “obsessed with a desire for revenge.”

The SVR also had information that Clinton suffered from “Type 2 diabetes, congestive heart disease, deep vein thrombosis, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.”

It’s just idle speculation of mine, but I’ll guess that as tranches of these documents continue to come out, we’ll also find that there were moral aspects as well to the compromised status Hillary had with respect to Russia. Specifically, perhaps, the Uranium One deal which the ancien regime media brushed off as “debunked” years ago without actually debunking anything.

Clinton’s email server scandal was also never disproven as a pattern of malfeasance, and in fact Gabbard’s latest disclosures show that then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch was pulling strings to ensure no real investigation occurred on why the secretary of state was doing government business on an unsecured private server, in contravention of federal law.

It’s not like we don’t know the answer. We’ve known it all along. Hillary Clinton was soliciting bribes on behalf of the Clinton Foundation grift engine as well as others, using her position as secretary of state in Barack Obama’s first term.

And she was doing it openly. Do you think everyone else in the Obama administration was unaware that her email address was not an official one?

Obama was in on everything Hillary was doing. If he wasn’t, he’d have put a stop to it.

Do you not think the Russian SVR was aware of this and happy to exploit it in the then-likely event that she would become the next president?

2. Why Bring This Back Up? Here’s a Theory on What Russiagate Was REALLY About

I ran across this on X, and it’s an eye-opener:

Today’s declassifications put the RussiaGate scandal into a new light.

If Hillary knew that the Russians had compromising material on her and believed she was on a cakewalk to the Oval Office?

Everything she did was about slipping out from under the thumb of that blackmail.…

— Derek. (@SuitablePolitic) July 23, 2025

It’s a long X post, but here’s the punch line:

With Obama’s help, they contrived a plan to help her slip the noose when she became POTUS.

They would preempt the material by destroying the image of the Russians.

But not just making them look bad. No, making them look like they had a motive to contrive evidence against her that was fake.

To do that, they needed a patsy.

So they used Donald Trump, who was never supposed to win.

They painted Trump as an asset of the Russians.

So, anything the Russians dropped against Hillary? It just made them look even more like the puppet masters behind Trump.

It was a flawlessly executed operation.

Well, almost.

There was one flaw.

Trump won.

The more I think back on all this, the more I lean toward the idea that this is exactly correct.

Putin wasn’t for Trump winning. Putin was licking his chops to put one over on Hillary (just like he put one over on Joe Biden later). And Team Hillary (and Team Obama) knew that. We know they knew it, because Gabbard just released the receipts that show us reading the SVR’s mail and intercepting their own assessments.

So this is the only thing that makes sense.

Especially in light of the Steele dossier, which on its face is utterly ridiculous. Why would anybody want to circulate tales of Trump paying for golden showers from hookers in Moscow hotels? That’s exceedingly random, and yet it was the work product Team Hillary commissioned from the paid liars at Fusion GPS.

You had to dirty Trump up if you were Team Hillary. You had to tie him to the Russians, even though there was nothing substantial to serve as the rope. So they used whatever they could.

And it wasn’t even about Trump. They thought they’d beat him. No, this was about regaining leverage on Putin, so if the Russians decided to drop their kompromat on Hillary to the international press, they could deflect it as lies from the Trump-Putin cabal.

But then when Trump won, everything changed because now, Team Hillary was exposed on several fronts. And it was no longer about Russia but about Trump and the danger he posed given his possession of the intelligence.

3. Megyn Kelly, Matt Taibbi, and the Presidential Daily Brief

This gets a little dense, and you’ve got to concentrate to follow it, but on Megyn Kelly’s podcast she and Matt Taibbi had a very good discussion of how on Dec. 9, 2016, we went as a country from not taking any of this Russia stuff seriously to committing to destroy the first Trump presidency over the Russia issue, and it’s pretty obvious who was responsible for that:

There’s a lot in there, but Taibbi makes a convincing case that it was Barack Obama who made the decision to lean into the Russia nonsense despite the bulk of the intelligence community recognizing there was nothing to it.

And that’s political warfare on a duly elected president by his predecessor.

My last column covered this, of course, but it can’t be overstated. We went from a crazy, physically compromised Democrat candidate concocting the Russia lie out of thin air to a sane, outgoing Democrat president weaponizing it on his way out of office so that he could usurp power from the American people.

Unforgivable.

4. We’ve Lost the Hulk

I guess the old “celebrities die in threes” thing is real, given that in the last couple of days Malcolm Jamal Warner and Ozzy Osbourne passed, and now it’s Terry Bollea, better known as pro wrestler and media personality Hulk Hogan.

He was 71.

But he’ll never really die. The Hulk was far too much a phenomenon to ever really leave us.

Even if you know pro wrestling is fake, you still have to appreciate the magic in a moment like this…

One of the most iconic sports and cultural moments of all time. Hulk Hogan slamming Andre the Giant belongs in the Hall of Fame. pic.twitter.com/Iee6rmQcq3

— Sean Davis (@seanmdav) July 24, 2025

Hogan died yesterday in Clearwater, Florida, of apparent cardiac arrest. He was 71. He and his wife found God and were baptized two years ago; may he rest well in heaven.

5. Two Episodes Down of Blockbusters, Nine More to Go

The previous two Mike Holman novels, King of the Jungle and From Hellmarsh With Love, serialized here at The American Spectator. When they did, we were dropping installments every Saturday morning.

This time, with Blockbusters, we’re dropping them on Wednesdays and Saturdays. Readers had let us know that waiting a week between installments was a pain, and I’m sympathetic — it irks me when Apple TV+ and Paramount Plus and Amazon Prime make me wait a week between show episodes.

But what’s the point of serialization if you’re just going to dump the entire thing for a binge reading? That’s a book, not a serial.

So twice a week is a happy medium.

The first two episodes of Blockbusters do a good bit of scene setting and establish the argument of the novel, which is that if you want to fix American culture, you’re going to have to tackle its principal manifestation, which at this point is film and TV — so our intrepid hero, backed with the unlimited capital of his allies, begins stumbling toward a plan to do so.

It’s a snowball rolling downhill of a story. It’s Get Shorty, or perhaps the opposite of Get Shorty, then it’s Wall Street, then it’s Secret of My Success. In Episode Three, which will drop tomorrow, we begin to see the transition from the first stage to the second, and it starts to get good.

But obviously, if you haven’t been reading the first two episodes, you should. Click here for the first episode, and here for the second.