Tulsi Gabbard's explosive claim that the Obama administration staged a "treasonous conspiracy" to manufacture Russian election interference in 2016 is directly contradicted by a bipartisan Senate investigation led by Republicans five years ago.
On Friday, Gabbard, now Director of National Intelligence under President Donald Trump, declassified a set of documents she argued show top Obama officials deliberately misled the public about Russian interference to damage Trump's presidency, CNN reported.
Gabbard claimed the intelligence findings were politically tainted and pushed a false narrative that Russia supported Trump and worked to sway the 2016 election. She accused the Obama administration of using the Steele dossier to justify its conclusions and said she planned to refer those involved to the Justice Department.
However, the Senate Intelligence Committee's 2020 report, which was led by Republicans, had already reviewed the same claims and upheld the original 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment.
That assessment, issued days before Trump took office, concluded that Russian President Vladimir Putin directed an influence campaign that included hacking Democratic emails and spreading disinformation to help Trump and harm Hillary Clinton. The Senate's review found no evidence of political interference in the intelligence process and confirmed that the Steele dossier was not used to shape the final analysis.
Sources familiar with the Senate's probe told CNN that Gabbard is conflating the lack of proven cyberattacks on voting infrastructure with the broader influence campaign. They say her memo misrepresents how intelligence agencies handled the dossier, which was excluded from the core analysis at the insistence of the CIA.
Despite this, Trump promoted Gabbard's claims over the weekend, sharing memes of Barack Obama officials in prison uniforms and calling the 2016 investigation "THE CRIME OF THE CENTURY." He also repeated his long-standing accusation that the intelligence community had tried to undermine him from the beginning.
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