ANALYSIS:
Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard’s stunning words that former President Obama led a “treasonous conspiracy” to sabotage his incoming successor, President Trump, stand as the starkest event so far in the Democratic Party-inspired Russia hoax and its dark history.
But an analysis by The Washington Times shows that Ms. Gabbard’s show-stopping press release contained one misleading conclusion in her argument that Mr. Obama’s political appointees snuffed out professional analysts’ opinions.
Ms. Gabbard’s release on July 18 of 100 pages of declassified documents came with two principal narratives.
First, Mr. Obama directed the director of national intelligence (DNI) to put together a quick four-week Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) that would elevate Moscow as the great election disruptor, with the implication that it was responsible for Mr. Trump’s 2016 win. Mr. Obama’s order basically demanded a rigged ICA, according to Ms. Gabbard’s argument. Mr. Obama did not ask if Russia did it, but how.
Secondly, the Jan. 6, 2017, ICA came with conclusions not universally supported by in-house intelligence professionals in 2016. Mr. Obama, DNI James Clapper, CIA Director John Brennan and FBI Director James Comey — all anti-Trump activists — exerted great influence, Ms. Gabbard said.
The ICA report contains seven “key judgments.” The first one, on which Mr. Obama’s team put the most emphasis, was the contested finding that the Kremlin favored Mr. Trump and worked to get him elected. This fell in line with the Democrats’ false Russian collusion charge, which they inflicted on Mr. Trump for the next three years.
Ms. Gabbard released a staff memo stating that the Obama ICA doubled down on the finding when it said that “further information has come to light since Election Day.” The Gabbard memo said the source for that new anti-Trump information was the Democratic Party-financed “Steele dossier,” which turned out to be a hoax.
“These documents detail a treasonous conspiracy by officials at the highest levels of the Obama White House to subvert the will of the American people and try to usurp the President from fulfilling his mandate,” Ms. Gabbard said.
Mr. Obama led a critical Dec. 9, 2016, White House strategy session that generated a buzz of emails that night alerting the bureaucracy that the president wanted a new anti-Moscow paper to release before Mr. Trump took office.
A DNI email that evening said it was not if Moscow interfered, but how:
“The IC [intelligence community] is prepared to produce an assessment per the President’s request, that pulls together the information we have on the tools Moscow used and the actions it took to influence the 2016 election, an explanation of why Moscow directed these activities, and how Moscow’s approach has changed over time, going back to 2008 and 2012 as reference points. ODNI will lead the effort with participation from CIA, FBI, NSA, and DHS.”
Misleading statement
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While Ms. Gabbard released papers that shone light on partisan operators wanting a parting shot at Mr. Trump, it contained a misleading statement, according to The Times’ analysis.
The finding, put partially in bold, was the lead “bulleted” item in her press release. The item was meant to showcase Ms.Gabbard’s contention that intelligence experts concluded Russia was not trying to influence the election with cyber attacks. It said:
“In the months leading up to the November 2016 election, the Intelligence Community (IC) consistently assessed that Russia is “probably not trying … to influence the election by using cyber means.”
This quote is taken from a Sept. 9, 2016, DNI email, but it is not what was said. The DNI official stated:
“I took the intent of this email to get the basic starting point regarding Russia. We agree with: Russia probably is not (and will not) trying to influence the election by using cyber means to manipulate computer-enabled election infrastructure.’’
The Gabbard press release cut off the sentence at “means.” Reading the full sentence, the official was not saying Russia would refrain from using cyber to influence the election, but that it would not be used to attack voting machines or “election infrastructure.”
In other words, the sentence was consistent with DNI views. And when the ICA came out in January 2017, it held to that view.
“DHS assesses that the types of systems Russian actors targeted or compromised were not involved in vote tallying,” the ICA said.
The Times reached out to the DNI press office but did not receive a reply.
While Ms. Gabbard’s language to describe Mr. Obama’s clique was explosive, the history behind what they did is startling. It was an attempted coup by smearing a presidential candidate, president-elect and sitting president with unfounded allegations, several Republican inquiries showed.
The Democrats’ allegation was repeated over and over again: Mr. Trump colluded with Russia. After three years of official investigations, the claim failed. The 2016-19 era thus became imprinted with “Russia hoax.”
Where did it begin?
Perhaps the “Russia hoax” started on that July day in 2016 when the Clinton campaign decided to pin on Mr. Trump the Russia hacking of Democratic National Committee computers.
Or on July 31, 2016, FBI Agent Peter Strzok opened the infamous “Crossfire Hurricane” investigation into Mr. Trump, based on unsubstantiated third-hand information from an Australian diplomat friendly with the Clintons. The FBI did not interview the Australian beforehand.
Or maybe it was on Aug. 8, when Mr. Strzok was texting his girlfriend, FBI lawyer Lisa Page. Mr. Trump isn’t “going to be president, right?” she asked. “No. No, he’s not. We’ll stop it,” replied the then-very powerful boyfriend.
That July, the Hillary Clinton campaign adopted the “Clinton Plan intelligence.” As outlined by special counsel John Durham in 2023, the campaign’s goal was to create, in essence, the Russia hoax.
Mr. Durham wrote of the “highly significant intelligence [the FBI] received from a trusted foreign source pointing to a Clinton campaign plan to vilify Trump by tying him to Vladimir Putin to divert attention from her own concerns relating to her use of a private email server.”
He said that while Mr. Strzok and FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe opened Crossfire Hurricane based on uncorroborated information, no case was opened to check out what Mrs. Clinton was up to.
The Steele Dossier
Then came the summer blockbuster. Arriving in town was Christopher Steele, an ex-British intelligence officer whom the Clinton campaign and DNC hired for $160,000 to find Russian dirt on Mr. Trump.
Mr. Steele’s dossier would become the biggest hoax in American political history. That June, Mr. Steele began sending pages to his handler and the Clinton campaign’s dark ops group, Fusion GPS, founded by Wall Street Journal reporters. Fusion began feeding reporters fabulously false tales about Mr. Trump — tales that Mr. Durham demolished in his 2023 report.
One of the most startling performances in the dossier theater was that of FBI Director James Comey.
Mr. Comey carried immense power as the nation’s top federal cop and immense influence to sell a particular piece of evidence.
In this case, he attached his complete loyalty to Mr. Steele and the dossier.
He trafficked the uncorroborated 35 pages through Washington’s power centers:
• To district court judges to obtain wiretaps. (The judges later accused the FBI of misleading them.)
• To CIA Director Brennan, whom he lobbied to embed the findings into Mr. Obama’s ICA.
• To President-elect Trump in person at Trump Tower, where Mr. Comey told him of the dossier’s salacious material. (He did not tell him, though, that the dossier was a big dump of Democratic Party opposition research designed to ruin Mr. Trump.)
• To the House Intelligence Committee in a March 2017 hearing, where he told the world that the entire Trump campaign was under FBI investigation. Then-Rep. Adam Schiff quickly accepted the role of dossier celebrant.
Mr. Durham’s report outlined the three-year FBI push to confirm the dossier’s tale of multiple felonies committed by Mr. Trump and his followers. Felonies such as the Trump campaign hired hackers to strike Democratic computers, and that Trump attorney Michael Cohen secretly traveled to Prague to meet Russian hoods and pay hush money. Neither happened.
The FBI never confirmed any of this despite paying the dossier’s main source, Russian Igor Danchenko, nearly $300,000 to turn his gossip into facts.
More remarkably, Mr. Danchenko sat down with the FBI in January and March 2017. He told them point-blank he never confirmed any allegation. “Zero,” he said. He was just repeating Moscow gossip.
And yet it was the dossier that spurred Mr. Comey, the larger FBI, the press, and the Clintons to bring down Mr. Trump. When Mr. Trump fired Mr. Comey in May 2017, Mr. McCabe quickly retaliated and unilaterally opened a criminal case against the president.
Alfa Bank
And the Clinton campaign had one more trick. Mrs. Clinton personally approved initiating a campaign to convince the FBI and public that Mr. Trump secretly communicated with the Kremlin through a computer server linked to Moscow’s Alfa Bank. The liberal news media quickly fell for the leak, as they did the dossier.
FBI headquarters shipped the Alfa case out of Washington. The Chicago field office quickly determined that no communication ever took place. The suspected server domain was never turned on.
There were three major official government Trump-Russia reports. The Justice Department inspector general castigated the FBI for dossier-fed wiretap affidavits that lied; special counsel Robert Mueller, surrounded by Democratic-linked attorneys, failed to confirm Russia collusion, his March 2019 report said.
And Mr. Durham’s report showed another shocking Russia hoax chapter. Mr. Danchenko made up a source to tell Mr. Steele there was a “well-developed conspiracy of cooperation” between Mr. Trump and the Kremlin.
This is the Russia hoax backdrop for Ms. Gabbard to ensnare the Obama inner circle in what she says was a treasonous plot. She has asked the Justice Department to open a case.
She released streams of declassified documents, including a chatter box of emails, showing the outgoing president was keenly interested in how the ICA would be written.
Can Russia tamper with votes?
The actual groundwork began Aug. 31, 2016, with this memo from an unidentified DNI staffer who explained exactly what Mr. Obama wanted: a look at where Russia would tamper with votes.
“POTUS [President Obama] agreed yesterday that our electoral apparatus (my term) should be considered as critical infrastructure,” the DNI official wrote. “I have directed my folks to generate an NIE on attendant cyber threats to this key infrastructure, and to get it done sooner than later. Obviously, we will need to work with your team to produce this.”
Eventually, the desire for a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), the premier such study, gave way to a quicker Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA).
That September, the Department of Homeland Security produced a report for the classified President’s Daily Brief (PDB) titled “Cyber Threats to US Election Unlikely To Alter Voting Outcomes.” It said Russia is an active computer hacker to disrupt America’s political process, but it couldn’t change the vote count.
“We assess that foreign adversaries do not have the capability to covertly overturn the vote outcome of the coming US presidential election by executing cyber attacks on election infrastructure. These adversaries — most notably Russia — can conduct cyber operations against election infrastructure to undermine the credibility of the process and weaken the perceived legitimacy of the winning candidate,” said the PDB.
Silent since the July 18 Gabbard broadside, former President Obama issued a statement on Tuesday:
“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. But these claims are outrageous enough to merit one. These bizarre allegations are ridiculous and a weak attempt at distraction. Nothing in the document issued last week undercuts the widely accepted conclusion that Russia worked to influence the 2016 presidential election but did not successfully manipulate any votes. These findings were affirmed in a 2020 report by the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee, led by then-Chairman Marco Rubio.”
The Ratcliffe report
Ms. Gabbard had a warm-up act.
CIA Director John Ratcliffe, on June 26, released his own “Tradecraft Review,” which focused on the CIA’s role in drafting the ICA.
There were new disclosures topped by this: Mr. Brennan decided to use a citation from the dossier, which was relegated to a summary in the report annex, in the ICA’s main body. It was placed to bolster the contested finding that Mr. Putin “aspired” to help Mr. Trump win the 2016 election.
Analysts protested, but Mr. Brennan, who as CIA director led the ICA’s overall drafting, disregarded them.
“Despite these objections, Brennan showed a preference for narrative consistency over analytical soundness,” the Ratcliffe report said. “When confronted with specific flaws in the Dossier by the two mission center leaders — one with extensive operational experience and the other with a strong analytic background — he appeared more swayed by the Dossier’s general conformity with existing theories than by legitimate tradecraft concerns. Brennan ultimately formalized his position in writing, stating that ’my bottom line is that I believe that the information warrants inclusion in the report.’”
In sum, Mr. Comey, who had insisted the dossier be inserted into the ICA narrative, and Mr. Brennan showed complete loyalty to a collection of unconfirmed Democrat-financed anti-Trump tales.
And something not in the ICA. Sen. Charles Grassley won the declassification of some Justice Department IG information redacted in the public iteration. One was that the U.S. believes Kremlin intelligence penetrated Christopher Steele’s source network and inserted the false story of Mr. Cohen traveling to Prague to meet Putin operatives.
In that case, Mr. Putin was not favoring Mr. Trump over Mrs. Clinton, as the ICA asserted.
After the Tradecraft Review release, Mr. Ratcliffe said on X, “All the world can now see the truth: Brennan, Clapper and Comey manipulated intelligence and silenced career professionals — all to get Trump.”
• Rowan Scarborough can be reached at rscarborough@washingtontimes.com.