On Wednesday, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard made the claim that Barack Obama committed an act of treason back in 2017 at the tail end of his presidency, just before the very beginning of President Trump’s first term.

She has now declassified documents that she claims prove intelligence officials in the Obama administration lied about Russia’s efforts to influence the 2016 election. She is claiming that the intelligence community assessment that was eventually released at the beginning of 2017, just before Donald Trump took office, was doctored in order to reach the conclusion (among others) that not only did the Russians interfere in the election, but the Russians did so in order to get Donald Trump elected.

She said Obama’s intelligence community created an intelligence assessment that they knew was false, saying, “There is irrefutable evidence that details how President Obama and his national security team directed the creation of an intelligence community assessment that they knew was false. They knew it would promote this contrived narrative that Russia interfered in the 2016 election to help President Trump, when selling it to the American people, as though it were true. It wasn’t.”

She says that she is now going to refer Barack Obama and others in the administration for criminal investigation by the DOJ.  She added that Barack Obama might be guilty of treason, which is a specific statutory charge.

This much is certainly true: the Obama administration clearly meant to undermine the incoming Trump administration through rumor, innuendo, and nonsense compiled into an intelligence community assessment about Russia and Trump, laying the predicate for four long years of Mueller’s investigatory trash. Tulsi Gabbard going after Barack Obama on a moral level is absolutely justified. On a legal level, it does create the necessity to actually do something that I don’t think is going to be actually fulfilled: it puts more pressure on the Attorney General to do something that she is almost certainly incapable of doing legally.

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The most shocking part of what Gabbard released yesterday is a House Intelligence Committee report that says the Russians clearly had negative information on Hillary Clinton that they did not drop during the 2016 election cycle, which undermines the oft-stated claim that they wanted Trump to win. If they wanted Trump to win, in the last days of the election, when Trump was narrowing the gap, they should have dropped all of the dirt they supposedly had. 

Kimberley Strassel over at The Wall Street Journal wrote:

By Dec. 8, 2016, the intel community had compiled a seven-page President’s Daily Brief draft on what “cyber” activities it had found during the election. The PBD cited the intelligence community’s “low-to-moderate-confidence” assessment that Russia was involved in the compromise of an inadequately protected Illinois voter registration database (and attempts on other states…The draft was scheduled to be published the next day. 

The next day, Dec. 9, the Obama White House gathered together its national-security principals to talk about a “sensitive topic,” including former DNI James Clapper, former CIA Director John Brennan (who had been spinning up a Russia-collusion narrative since July), FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, Attorney General Loretta Lynch and others.

After the meeting, Mr. Clapper’s assistant sent out an email entitled “POTUS Tasking on Russia Election Meddling,” asking DNI officials to create an “assessment per the President’s request.” 

That was unusual. Usually, the way you do intelligence assessments is to look at the available intelligence and then the intelligence community filters it, double-checks it, and creates an assessment. You don’t have the president say, “I want you to reassess the information that you’ve already put into this intelligence assessment.” 

From there, wrote Strassel, “It was a straight shot to the new and inflammatory January 6th intelligence community assessment. The new ICA baldly blared: ‘We assess Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the US presidential election. Russia’s goals were to undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency. We further assess Putin and the Russian Government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump. We have high confidence in these judgements.’”

The assessment from January 6 suggested that the Russians interfered to help Trump and to hurt Clinton. And that, of course, was the line retailed for the next several years and even up till today by Democrats. But it is not true according to this House intelligence report.

There was not strong enough intelligence to suggest that the Russians preferred Trump to Clinton, and that’s why the Obama team was doing what they were doing, as opposed to just screwing around with our elections, which is something they’ve been doing since the days of the Soviet Union.

All of this should see the light of day, of course. Much of it was already known. Russiagate is one of the worst scandals in American history, because having an administration and a deep state dedicated to undermining the president of the United States for four years is insane.

It is fully justified and necessary for people like Gabbard to expose all of this. The problem comes when you oversell, because once you oversell, you end up putting your own administration in a bad position, because people want actual prosecutions.

When you oversell, you end up under-delivering. And when you under-deliver, people get very, very angry.