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The director of national intelligence told Americans this week that what everyone has known about the 2016 election is backwards.
The US intelligence community; bipartisan Senate review; the Mueller report; the Durham report — years of investigations concluded or did not dispute the idea that Russia meddled in the election and that it preferred Donald Trump to Hillary Clinton.
In Gabbard’s telling, the idea that Russia meddled and that it favored Trump is a narrative spun out of a conspiracy hatched by then-President Barack Obama to undermine Trump from the get-go. Trump clearly approves of Gabbard’s version, although there’s no evidence to support her claims.
Both Trump and Gabbard said Obama could be guilty of treason, which they did not mention is a crime punishable by death. Both Trump and Gabbard left it to Attorney General Pam Bondi to figure out the legal ramifications.
Obama, obviously, disputed the claims, which go against the documented fact pattern, and issued a rare statement condemning Gabbard’s spectacular claims.
I went to CNN’s Jeremy Herb to better understand what the facts say and how Gabbard is trying to undermine them. Our conversation, conducted by email, is below.
WOLF: Tulsi Gabbard and Donald Trump appear to be trying to flip the script on the history of the 2016 election. What is the broad outline of the allegation?
HERB: Trump, Gabbard and their conservative allies allege that after the 2016 election, President Barack Obama ordered US intelligence agencies to compile an assessment of Russian election interference in order to undermine Trump’s legitimacy before he took office. Gabbard accuses the Obama administration of “manufacturing” the intelligence in the January 2017 report, which contained the intelligence community’s assessment that Russia interfered and sought to help Trump win. Both she and Trump have suggested Obama and his team were “treasonous.”
WOLF: What is the broad outline of what we actually know happened in 2016?
HERB: The assessment released by the intelligence community after the 2016 election documented Russia’s efforts to interfere in the 2016 election.
The unclassified version of the report was released in January 2017, detailing both a social media influence campaign and cyber operations like the hacking and strategic release of Democrats’ emails by Wikileaks. The assessment made several judgments, including:
► that Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign to undermine faith in the democratic process, denigrate Hillary Clinton and harm her electability and potential presidency,
► that Putin and the Russian government developed a clear preference for Trump,
► that Putin and the Russian government aspired to help Trump’s election chances.
It’s the third assessment — which was made with high confidence by the FBI and CIA and medium confidence by the NSA — that’s been the source of criticism from Trump’s allies for years.
WOLF: Is there any evidence to contradict what Trump and Gabbard are alleging?
HERB: There’s plenty, including even in the documents that Gabbard has released so far.
Gabbard has declassified two sets of documents. She claimed the first set, released last week, was evidence that the intelligence community found before the Obama-ordered assessment that Russia did not hack election infrastructure to alter the election outcome. But that isn’t what the intelligence community concluded in the assessment in the first place: Intelligence officials alleged that Russia carried out an influence and hacking campaign to influence voters — they never claimed Russia changed vote tallies. Our sources who previously scrutinized the assessment said Gabbard was conflating two things to try to make a political point; one called it “wildly misleading.”
The newest set of documents, released Wednesday, is a previously classified Republican congressional report from 2017 challenging one of the conclusions from the intelligence community assessment: that Putin aspired to help Trump in 2016. It alleges that the assessment made leaps of logic based on thin sourcing and failed to weigh contradictory evidence.
But disputing the way raw intelligence was analyzed is not the same thing as alleging the intelligence community “manufactured” intelligence — and CIA Director John Ratcliffe’s own review of the intelligence assessment doesn’t support Gabbard’s allegation, either.
There are other holes in Gabbard’s narrative.
She said that a draft of the December 8, 2016, president’s daily brief was shelved after it stated that Russian actors “did not impact recent US election results” by conducting cyber attacks on election infrastructure.
The next day, Gabbard alleged, Obama and his team launched the effort for a new assessment to claim the “election was ‘hacked,’” pointing to a high-level meeting of Obama officials on December 9.
The problem? According to the Senate Intelligence Committee, Obama instructed then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper to prepare a report on Russian election interference on December 6 — two days before the alleged shelving of the presidential brief on election infrastructure.
WOLF: Who wrote this 2017 House intelligence committee report Gabbard has made public? Why wasn’t it released before?
HERB: Trump and his allies in Congress have wanted to release the House Intelligence Committee report for years.
It was drafted by Republicans during the first Trump administration when the panel was chaired by former Rep. Devin Nunes, now CEO of Trump’s social media company. Kash Patel, now Trump’s FBI director, was a top committee aide. The intelligence the committee scrutinized was so sensitive that the CIA only allowed staffers and lawmakers to view it and work on their report at CIA headquarters. The committee brought in a safe to lock up its material, which was kept in a CIA vault; it became known as a “turducken,” or a safe within a safe.
Before the 2020 election, Trump’s allies pushed Ratcliffe, who was director of national intelligence during Trump’s first term, to declassify and release the report. But he declined to do so amid strenuous pushback by CIA and NSA officials because of the sensitive information contained in it.
Democrats and former intelligence officials warned us that even with the redactions contained in Wednesday’s release, there was still information contained in the report that could risk exposing sources and methods to the Russians.
The raw intelligence contained in this classified House report is part of what prompted the intelligence community to grow so concerned when a binder full of documents related to the FBI’s Russia investigation went missing at the end of the first Trump administration.
WOLF: There have been many reports that support the accepted narrative that Russia meddled to help Trump in 2016. Which are the most important?
HERB: The Senate Intelligence Committee also spent several years investigating Russian election interference, and that panel — on a bipartisan basis — came to the opposite conclusion as House Republicans on the intelligence assessment.
The Senate panel found that the judgments made by the intelligence assessment were well-supported and did not have any “significant analytic tradecraft issues.”
“The Committee found that the ICA presents information from public Russian leadership commentary, Russian state media reports, and specific intelligence reporting to support the assessment that Putin and the Russian Government demonstrated a preference for candidate Trump,” the 2020 Senate report stated.
It’s important to note that the bipartisan report came from a Republican-led committee, chaired through most of the investigation by then-Sen. Richard Burr of North Carolina. When the report was released, the panel was led by Marco Rubio — now Trump’s secretary of state.
The intelligence community’s assessment of Russian interference has also been a topic for the Justice Department’s inspector general, as well as special counsels Robert Mueller and John Durham.
Durham was appointed by then-Attorney General Bill Barr in Trump’s first term to investigate potential wrongdoing, including anti-Trump bias, during the FBI’s early investigation into Russia and the Trump campaign. He also probed whether there was any wrongdoing by the FBI and intelligence community during the 2016 post-election period but never accused any US officials of any crimes related to the 2017 intelligence assessment.
WOLF: The president has promised investigations in the past that have failed to uncover massive anti-Trump conspiracies. His first-term inquiry into election fraud found none. Durham’s sprawling probe fell far short of Trump’s sky-high expectations. Is that what will happen here?
HERB: On Wednesday evening, Bondi announced a strike force that would be dedicated to investigating the documents Gabbard had released and her allegations that the Obama administration “manufactured” evidence about Russia’s election interference.
That followed reports from CNN and others earlier this month that the FBI was investigating former Obama-era CIA Director John Brennan and former FBI Director James Comey following a referral from Ratcliffe in his review of the intelligence community assessment.
Will those investigations lead to breaking new ground and criminal charges? It’s impossible to say, of course. But as I noted above, Durham was appointed by the Trump Justice Department and conducted a four-year investigation into all topics related to the origins of the Russia investigation, which included questioning Brennan in 2020. (Brennan, who denies wrongdoing, was never charged.)
And despite Gabbard’s claims, there’s nothing in the documents she released that appears to fundamentally change what we knew about the assessment the intelligence community created in 2017 or the conclusion that Russia interfered in the 2016 election.
And then there’s the Steele dossier
WOLF: What about the dossier? Was that part of this intelligence assessment and the latest allegations?
HERB: A summary of the infamous dossier from British intelligence officer Christopher Steele was included as an annex to the January 2017 intelligence community assessment. The inclusion of the dossier in the assessment — and the news first broken by CNN of the dossier’s existence soon thereafter — is part of why Trump and his allies are so critical of the intelligence community’s assessment in the first place.
The dossier was paid for by the Clinton campaign and included many wild and salacious allegations involving Trump and his campaign that were ultimately discredited. The FBI also erred in using the dossier to wrongly obtain two FISA surveillance warrants on a former Trump campaign adviser.
But reviews of the intelligence community’s assessment have shown that the dossier was not behind the analysis in the assessment, as Gabbard has tried to claim over the past week.
The Senate Intelligence investigation interviewed the analysts who prepared the report. There was a debate between the FBI and CIA over whether the dossier should have been included in the assessment — it was left out at the insistence of CIA officials.
“All individuals the Committee interviewed stated that the Steele material did not in any way inform the analysis in the ICA — including the key judgments — because it was unverified information and had not been disseminated as serialized intelligence reporting,” the Senate report states.
What does the evidence say about Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russia?
WOLF: Trump has repeated the term “Russia hoax” so much that it is hardwired in people’s brains. But there were many documented ties between Russians and Trump’s campaign in the Mueller report. Is there political risk to Trump relitigating the 2016 election again?
HERB: Trump and his allies have undertaken a yearslong campaign to discredit all attempts to tie Russian interference to Trump, including the intelligence community assessment, the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane investigation and the Mueller investigation.
Trump’s allies helped unearth numerous missteps in the investigations, from FBI’s errors relying on the dossier to obtain FISA warrants to the anti-Trump text messages exchanged between Peter Strzok and Lisa Page.
But Trump’s repeated claims that the whole 2016 investigation was a hoax ignore the fact that numerous investigations effectively documented that Russia did in fact interfere. The Mueller probe did not establish a criminal conspiracy between the Russians and the Trump campaign, but the special counsel did document dozens of Trump-Russia contacts during the campaign, despite Trump repeatedly claiming falsely that no contacts existed. Most notably, the contacts included Donald Trump Jr.’s Trump Tower meeting where he was offered, and welcomed, “dirt” on Hillary Clinton.
The Senate Intelligence Committee investigation, released in 2020, went even further than Mueller to detail contacts between Russian government agents and the Trump campaign.
But like Trump’s false claims about the 2020 election, the president’s focus on Russian election interference pushes aside any information contrary to his narrative. He’s cheered on Gabbard — whose standing in the Trump administration had been in question following the Iran strikes — as she’s launched the latest attacks to back up Trump’s claim of a Russian hoax.
