President Donald Trump’s administration has dropped a bombshell in his second term that threatens to blow up the narrative surrounding the investigation, which cast a long shadow over his first.
Newly declassified documents cast doubt on whether Russian interference in the 2016 election was fully intended to help Trump win, implicating the president’s political opponents in the Democratic administration serving at the time in jumping to that conclusion.
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Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard argues that this was deliberate and potentially criminal, as she refers the matter to the Justice Department.
“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,” Gabbard said at a White House press briefing on Wednesday. “They knew it would promote this contrived narrative that Russia interfered in the 2016 election to help President Trump win, selling it to the American people as though it were true. It wasn’t.”
“[Russian President Vladimir] Putin’s principal interests relating to the 2016 election were to undermine faith in the U.S. democratic process, not show any preference of a certain candidate,” Gabbard told reporters. “In fact, this report shows Putin held back leaking — held back from leaking compromising material on Hillary Clinton prior to the election, instead planning to release it after the election to weaken what Moscow viewed as an inevitable Clinton presidency.”
“This is truly one of the greatest political scandals in American history, and reporters at legacy outlets — some of which are sitting in this room today like the New York Times and the Washington Post — were ridiculously awarded Pulitzer Prizes for their perpetuation of this hoax,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said at the briefing. “It’s well past time for those awards to be stripped from the journalists who received them. It is not journalism to propagate political disinformation in service of the Democrat Party and those in the intelligence community who hand over out-of-context and fake intelligence to push a false political narrative.”
Even before Gabbard’s report, investigators were unable to prove collusion between the Russian government and Trump or his campaign. Trump-Russia special counsel Robert Mueller did not identify a single witting American ally of the Kremlin’s effort in his lengthy report on the matter, which never became the basis of an impeachment inquiry by the Democratic-controlled House.
But Democrats remained suspicious of collusion. Hillary Clinton spoke at length about what she thought such coordination entailed. Mueller intimated in his report that his failure to prove a Trump-Russia conspiracy may have been due to the Trump team’s lack of cooperation rather than its nonexistence. The special counsel directly stated the Trump campaign was happy to receive Russia’s help, even if he could not establish they engaged in any illegal conspiracy to obtain it.
The new revelations not only undermine these allegations but also the basis for the pre-Mueller investigations into the Trump campaign by the Obama administration. And it’s worth noting that even the statement from the former president’s spokesman defends only “the widely accepted conclusion that Russia worked to influence the 2016 presidential election but did not successfully manipulate any votes.”
“There was a gross politicization and manipulation of intelligence by the Obama administration intended to delegitimize President Trump even before he was inaugurated, ultimately usurping the will of the American people,” Gabbard said.
The question is whether enough people will care to have any real-world effect. Voters are pretty dug in on Trump-Russia one way or the other by now. Republicans and Trump supporters considered the whole thing a hoax years before Gabbard’s report, while Democrats told pollsters that Putin literally hacked the election — that is, altered votes to help Trump win — even when the Obama administration said otherwise.
A criminal prosecution of former President Barack Obama would face all the legal, political, and practical pitfalls that hampered the various Trump indictments. As a result of the Trump cases, the Supreme Court has also handed down a ruling in favor of broad presidential immunity from prosecution for official acts.
Trump has a history of peddling various anti-Obama stories, some of them baseless. There could be a boy who cried wolf effect here.
Much of the press outside the conservative media has a vested interest in the long-standing Trump-Russia narrative never being debunked. “This is hardly information we should even be repeating,” CNN’s Jeff Zeleny said during a Wednesday broadcast. “Never mind that it’s some years after the fact, eight years, more than that after the fact. But also, just to look at the source. But look, this is what this White House wants to talk about.”
With the Trump White House having difficulty containing the Jeffrey Epstein fallout, the timing will raise suspicions, even if this has long been in the works.
However, a reappraisal of the Russiagate scandal could last far beyond the current political moment and may be long overdue.