The Department of Justice announced on Wednesday the creation of a so-called strike force to investigate allegations advanced by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard that former President Barack Obama and members of his administration led a “treasonous” conspiracy to promote the false claim that Trump colluded with Russia to rig the 2016 election.
The task force announcement came hours after Gabbard released a previously classified House Intelligence Committee report that said the conclusion that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s was interested in aiding Trump was based on “one scant, unclear, and unverifiable fragment of a sentence from one of the substandard reports.”
The DOJ strike force will assess the legal options it can take in response to the “alleged weaponization of the intelligence community.”
“The Department of Justice is proud to work with my friend Director Gabbard and we are grateful for her partnership in delivering accountability for the American people. We will investigate these troubling disclosures fully and leave no stone unturned to deliver justice,” Attorney General Pam Bondi said.
While Gabbard and other Trump officials have cast the newly declassified report as a significant development in their efforts to expose wrongdoing, many of the the report’s conclusions have come to light in the years since it was drafted. The report, which was drafted in 2017 but edited through 2020, confirms that then-CIA Director John Brennan pushed five handpicked analysts to rush out an Intelligence Community Assessment concluding that Russian President Vladimir Putin had a clear preference for Trump over Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election, and intervened in the election to secure that outcome.
Several of the analysts pushed back on Brennan, according to the report, pointing out that they lacked evidence to support the claim that Putin had a clear preference for Trump, but Brennan urged them on anyway.
“Our instructions were that anything we had was to be used,” an FBI source told the committee. “We were to push this.”
The report also confirms that much of the Russiagate narrative was based on allegations advanced in the Steele Dossier, the unverified opposition research document commissioned by the Clinton Campaign. When another of Brennan’s analysts pointed out that the dossier’s claims, including that Trump had been compromised by Putin, could not be substantiated, Brennan replied, “Yes, but doesn’t it ring true?”
While the claim that Trump and Putin were working together, or even that Putin had a clear preference for Trump in the election, could not be substantiated, the report notes that there was significant evidence to suggest that Putin did in fact meddle in the election.
“Putin ordered conventional and cyber influence operations, notably by leaking politically sensitive emails obtained from computer intrusions,” the report reads. The analysts concluded that Putin wanted to “undermine faith in the US democratic process” and weaken the presumed Clinton presidency, rather than support Trump.
Those findings are consistent with a CIA report released last week as well as numerous other intelligence reviews — including a Senate Intelligence Committee report authored while then-Senator Marco Rubio led the committee — which also concluded that Putin attempted to intervene in the election.
Neither Gabbard nor any DOJ official has identified specific criminal activity and, were any criminal conduct identified, Obama and his officials would likely be beyond the reach of law enforcement given that the conduct would have occurred more than five years ago, outside the statute of limitations for most relevant offenses.
Gabbard told Fox News’s Jesse Watters, “The American people deserve the truth, and they deserve accountability, which is I’m really glad to see that Attorney General Pam Bondi and the Department of Justice announced the creation of a strike force team today.”
She wrote in a viral X post last week that the Obama administration laid the groundwork “for what was essentially a years-long coup” against Trump.
“For months preceding the 2016 election, the Intelligence Community shared a consensus view: Russia lacked the intent and capability to hack U.S. elections,” Gabbard said. “But weeks after President Trump’s historic 2016 victory defeating Hillary Clinton, everything changed.”
An Obama spokesman said “Out of respect for the office of the presidency, our office does not normally dignify the constant nonsense and misinformation flowing out of this White House with a response.” He called the claims “outrageous” and said the “bizarre allegations are ridiculous and a weak attempt at distraction.”
Others have pushed back against the claims of wrongdoing. Senator Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, noted that “the bipartisan, unanimous finding of the Senate Intelligence Committee, after years of painstaking investigation, more than 200 witness interviews, and millions of documents, was that Russia launched a large-scale influence campaign in the 2016 election in order to help then-candidate Donald Trump.”