“The only logical conclusion that I can draw in this, Maria, is what you’re implying here directly, is that there was direct intent to cover up the truth about what occurred and who was responsible and the broad network of how this seditious conspiracy was concocted and who exactly was responsible for carrying it out.”

— Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, speaking to Maria Bartiromo on “Sunday Morning Futures,” July 20

With fanfare, Gabbard on Friday released alleged evidence of what she called a “treasonous conspiracy in 2016 committed by officials at the highest level of our government” — namely the intelligence community’s conclusion in early 2017 that Russian President Vladimir Putin decided to interfere in the 2016 presidential election on behalf of Donald Trump. The president has embraced her findings — which she said would be referred for criminal prosecution — and even tweeted an AI-generated video of Barack Obama being arrested.

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But Gabbard has a problem. How can she discover new evidence that somehow eluded four previous investigations: a 2019 report released by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III; a 2019 Justice Department inspector general report; a bipartisan report by the Senate Intelligence Committee issued in 2020 by a GOP-controlled Senate; and a 2023 report released by special counsel John Durham, appointed in Trump’s first term?

All told, the previous reports add up to about 2,500 pages of dense prose, compared with the thin gruel of emails and meeting agendas released by Gabbard. Her report provides no indication that she has studied the earlier investigations. Yet she asserts there was “direct intent to cover up the truth about what occurred.”

If so, one of the co-conspirators would be current Secretary of State Marco Rubio. As a Republican senator from Florida serving on the Intelligence Committee, Rubio signed off on reports that scrutinized the creation of the Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) about Russia’s involvement in the 2016 campaign. One of the reports, Volume 4, devoted almost 160 pages to the development of the intelligence assessment attacked by Gabbard. In examining the ICA, senators held two hearings that included interviews with key players involved in the preparation of the document.

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“The Committee found the ICA presents a coherent and well-constructed intelligence basis for the case of unprecedented Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election,” the report said. “On the analytic lines of the ICA, the Committee concludes that all [redacted] analytic lines are supported with all-source intelligence, although with varying substantiation. The Committee did not discover any significant analytic tradecraft issues in the preparation or final presentation of the ICA.”

Rubio embraced Volume 5 of the committee investigation report as well, which said Putin personally ordered the hack.

“Moscow’s intent was to harm the Clinton Campaign, tarnish an expected Clinton presidential administration, help the Trump Campaign after Trump became the presumptive Republican nominee, and undermine the U.S. democratic process,” the report said.

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In that report, Rubio also signed an additional statement with five other Republican senators: “As is evident to those who read all five volumes of the Committee’s report, the Russian government inappropriately meddled in our 2016 general election in many ways but then-Candidate Trump was not complicit.”

In Mueller’s probe, he concluded that Russian government actors successfully hacked into computers and obtained emails from people associated with Hillary Clinton’s campaign and Democratic Party organizations, and then publicly disseminated those materials through various intermediaries, including WikiLeaks, to sow discord in the United States, hurt Clinton and help Trump. In 2018, Mueller obtained an indictment of a dozen Russians for their alleged roles in the operation, but they have not been extradited.

Even the Durham report (broadly sympathetic to Trump) referenced the ICA in a footnote and acknowledged the previous three reports for “the contributions they have made to our understanding of Russian election interference efforts.”

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In other words, report after report backed up the ICA’s conclusion. Trump, however, has always rejected it — and Gabbard now has tried to undermine it yet again. How does she accomplish this? Here are some of her tools.

Bait and switch

Gabbard suggests the ICA concluded that Russia hacked into U.S. election systems, while the ICA actually focused on Russian operations that targeted the Democratic National Committee and obtained documents that were provided to WikiLeaks, which then doled them out slowly to the detriment of the Clinton campaign. Trump jumped on the WikiLeaks releases, including one that falsely claimed that Clinton used the Clinton Foundation to pay for her daughter’s wedding. “I love WikiLeaks,” Trump told rallies in 2016.

In a timeline, Gabbard focuses on low-level bureaucratic issues, such as whether a presidential daily brief regarding cyberattacks was withdrawn because of an FBI dissent. But this focus on the weeds distracts from the ICA’s broad conclusion that Russia attempted to intervene in the election on behalf of Trump.

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Russia’s greatest success was hacking into the DNC computers and filching emails, though the Russians also attempted to hack the Republican National Committee. Russian operatives then exploited the release of the emails on social media.

As for hacking voting systems, the ICA firmly stated: “DHS assesses that the types of systems Russian actors targeted or compromised were not involved in vote tallying.”

(The conclusion was premature. In mid-2017, National Security Agency contractor Reality Winner leaked an NSA report generated that year that showed Russian military intelligence officials hacked at least one supplier of voting software and tried to break into more than 100 local election systems before the polls closed in 2016.)

Quoted out of context

Gabbard misquotes news reports, which are included in her timeline without links, making it difficult for people to check the original reports.

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For instance, she faults a Washington Post report published on Dec. 9, 2016, writing: “Deep State officials in the IC begin leaking blatantly false intelligence to The Washington Post, as proven by the unpublished PDB and previous IC products, claiming that Russia used ‘cyber means’ to influence ‘the outcome of the election.’”

The article said the CIA had concluded that “Russia intervened in the 2016 election to help Donald Trump win the presidency, rather than just to undermine confidence in the U.S. electoral system.” Gabbard writes that “at this point, there is no official IC assessment that contains that conclusion.”

But that’s also what the story itself reported: “The CIA presentation to senators about Russia’s intentions fell short of a formal U.S. assessment produced by all 17 intelligence agencies. A senior U.S. official said there were minor disagreements among intelligence officials about the agency’s assessment, in part because some questions remain unanswered.”

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Similarly, she writes that on Dec. 14, 2016, “IC officials again leak to the media, this time claiming that IC officials believe ‘with a high level of confidence’ that Russian President Vladimir Putin was personally involved in the ‘U.S. Election Hack.’”

The NBC News report, which confirmed the earlier Washington Post reporting, does not use the phrase “election hack” — though the headline does. Moreover, Gabbard does not report the section of the article that makes clear that reporters are referring to the DNC hack, not general election systems: “Two senior officials with direct access to the information say new intelligence shows that Putin personally directed how hacked material from Democrats was leaked and otherwise used.”

Elevating the ‘Steele dossier’

The Steele dossier — memos alleging a “well-developed conspiracy of cooperation” between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin — was assembled by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele, working under contract for a private investigation firm at the behest of Clinton’s campaign. Gabbard includes 2019 emails from an unnamed “ODNI Whistleblower” who recalls being shocked when told by a colleague that the Steele dossier was a “factor” in the ICA, suggesting the final product was changed because of the Steele dossier.

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The Steele dossier has long faced scrutiny. Volume 5 of the Senate committee investigation contained an exhaustive review of the FBI’s embrace of the Steele dossier, as did the DOJ inspector general’s report and the Durham report. These investigations raise serious questions about the FBI’s reliance on Steele’s reporting — which hyped findings from dubious sources — but calling it “a factor” in the ICA is a stretch.

Volume 4 of the Senate investigation reported that the FBI wanted to weave some of Steele’s reporting in the text of the report, but other analysts and senior CIA officials objected. “I felt [it] was not appropriate for inclusion in the report and would detract from the report,” an unnamed assistant director of an intelligence agency said. Another unnamed analyst told investigators, “We had a bitter argument with the FBI to put it in an annex.”

As a compromise, a summary of the Steele dossier was added as a classified appendix to the ICA at the instance of the FBI because “they didn’t want to look like they were hiding anything,” an official said.

Why did the intelligence community become more convinced that Putin directed the effort to swing the election to Trump, instead of just seeking to inject turmoil in the U.S. elections? As the news reports misquoted by Gabbard show — and as subsequent investigations confirmed — additional, credible intelligence showed that Putin decided to back Trump over Clinton. That’s not a conspiracy but a natural evolution from careful investigative work.

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