The Trump administration is pressing forward with an investigation after Director of National Security Tulsi Gabbard released a report claiming that senior officials in the Obama administration “manufactured intelligence” related to Russian interference in the 2016 election.
President Trump over the weekend posted an apparently AI-generated video of former President Obama getting arrested, along with mug shots of other senior Obama administration officials.
On Friday, Gabbard said her office turned over evidence of a “treasonous conspiracy” to the Justice Department for possible criminal referrals for officials, including former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, former CIA Director John Brennan and former FBI Director James Comey.
Gabbard told Fox News Channel’s Maria Bartiromo over the weekend that in the final days of the Obama administration, officials concluded “there was no intelligence that reflected that Russia was trying to hack the election in favor of either candidate.”
However, Gabbard says that assessment was yanked after a National Security Council meeting, which instead produced a document stating that Russia had interfered in an effort to elect Trump to the presidency.
“This document that they published in January of 2017 was the foundational groundwork that they continued to reference over and over and over again to enact this yearlong coup against President Trump,” Gabbard said.
Those claims are at odds with a three-year bipartisan Senate investigation, which found that Russia used social media to interfere with the election on Trump’s behalf. Gabbard is arguing that the Senate probe was based on manipulated intelligence.
The Senate report also determined that “no evidence that any votes were changed or that any voting machines were manipulated.”
Special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation subsequently failed to turn up evidence of collusion between Trump and Russia.
Gabbard’s findings have largely landed with a thud in the national media, only gaining traction in right-wing media spheres.
Democrats are accusing Gabbard of lying to politicize the Intelligence Community.
“Tulsi Gabbard is not competent to be the director of national intelligence,” Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), the vice chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said at the Aspen Security Forum in Colorado. “I believe she is trying to politicize the workforce and work product, and that makes America less safe.”
Warner’s remarks were also notable for where they happened.
The Pentagon pulled senior Defense Department officials from the annual Aspen Security Forum only a day before it started, claiming the bipartisan gathering “promotes the evil of globalism, disdain for our great country, and hatred for the President of the United States.”
Rep. Jim Himes (D-Conn.), the ranking member on the House Intelligence Committee, called Gabbard’s claims a “dangerous lie.”
“When you start throwing around language like ‘sedition’ and ‘treason,’ somebody’s going to get hurt,” he said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”
The Russian election interference saga — and claims of collusion by Trump officials — resulted in investigations and a media frenzy that dominated Trump’s first term in office.
Trump has called the episode a “hoax.” Earlier this year, Trump signed an executive order to declassify “all files related to Crossfire Hurricane,” the name of the FBI’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.
MEANWHILE…
Russia launched another round of attacks on Ukraine on Monday, hours before European leaders met to discuss Trump’s plan to sell NATO weapons to defend Ukraine.
Over the weekend, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky asked Moscow to hold another round of peace talks.
“Everything should be done to achieve a ceasefire,” Zelensky said in his evening address to the nation. “The Russian side should stop hiding from decisions.”
Trump last week opened up a 50-day window for a ceasefire before he said he’d impose steep tariffs on Russia’s trade partners.
Moscow says it’s sticking to its war plans.
“Our goals are clear, obvious, they have not changed,” said Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Leskov.
