The director of national intelligence makes a frivolous argument.
The director of national intelligence makes a frivolous argument.
D o Trump intelligence officials speak with each other? Does Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, read the reports generated by the Central Intelligence Agency?
There is good reason to wonder.
Last Friday, DNI Gabbard breathlessly released a slew of email communications between intelligence officials that showed what we have already known for years — indeed, what was established by a yearslong probe conducted by John Durham, a special counsel appointed by the Justice Department in the first Trump administration precisely to investigate the fabrication of a Trump-Russia collusion narrative. To wit: Despite the absence of evidence that Russian machinations had any substantive impact on the 2016 election, the Obama-era intelligence services, including the FBI, CIA, and ODNI, egged on by the White House, generated an intelligence community assessment (ICA) to highlight Russia’s inconsequential interference in that election. The ICA stressed that Vladimir Putin’s regime was trying to damage Hillary Clinton, and it speculated that Putin “aspired” to help Donald Trump.
In 2018, as Russiagate was unfolding (and while Gabbard was a progressive Democratic congresswoman planning what turned out to be a failed 2020 bid for the party’s nomination), I wrote a book about it, Ball of Collusion: The Plot to Rig an Election and Destroy a Presidency. There have been multiple extensive investigations and government reports since then, but what I argued in the book is that the real collusion was between the Clinton campaign and Obama administration officials to put the government’s law enforcement and intelligence apparatus in the service of Democratic Party objectives.
No new light is shed on this episode by Gabbard’s email disclosures last Friday, which, unsurprisingly, were accompanied by an overwrought and misleading press release rather than an analytical report. Perhaps that is because Gabbard’s intelligence community peer, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, did issue an analytical report just a few days earlier that contradicts Gabbard’s implication that there was no evidence of Russian interference in the 2016 election.
Last week, we posted my three-part “Russiagate Revisited” series (click here for parts one, two, and three), in which I critiqued the new CIA report — in the mode of “lessons learned” — regarding the ICA’s analysis of Russia’s interference in the 2016 election (completed in December 2016, with a nonclassified version released on January 6, 2017).
In part three, in particular, I contended that the Trump administration’s decision to revive this episode, while titillating for the MAGA political base, was self-sabotage. That is mainly because, after months of scrutiny, the Trump CIA has reaffirmed the ICA’s conclusions that (1) Russia sought to interfere in the 2016 election and (2) did so in order to denigrate Hillary Clinton — i.e., Kremlin strongman Vladimir Putin anticipated that Clinton would be elected and hoped to make her a less effective president, which would be in Russia’s interest as America’s geopolitical rival.
The public position of President Trump and his most ardent supporters — the position that Gabbard reiterates — is that Russiagate was a total hoax, a complete fabrication by Democrats, without a shred of truth to it, concocted to undermine his presidency. This has always been a foolish stance.
Russia habitually tries to influence American politics, including electoral politics, just as our government has for decades intruded in the politics of the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia. (In fact, the Obama administration’s support of the revolt that ousted Ukraine’s democratically elected, pro-Russian regime in 2013–14 motivated both Putin’s 2014 annexation of Crimea and the 2016 denigration of Clinton, Obama’s former secretary of state.) Russia’s efforts in this regard, and specifically in 2016, have been laughably ineffective; that doesn’t mean they haven’t happened at all.
The Democrats’ caterwauling that Russia stole the 2016 election from Clinton was nonsense. It has long been widely recognized for what it was: a fever dream by which Democrats sought to avoid conceding the true cause of the party’s loss — its nomination of a deeply unpopular, scandal-scarred, politically flat-footed candidate. Yet, by claiming that there was no evidence of Russian interference, the Trump camp invites correction (including, now, from the Trump administration’s own CIA) and thereby turns into a matter of consequence something that was utterly inconsequential.
As I detailed in the three-part series, the principal flaw in Ratcliffe’s report — which he accompanied with a referral to the Justice Department, as did Gabbard in her press release — was its attempt to manufacture a false statement in order to generate a predicate for renewed investigation and potential prosecution of Obama officials.
In a nutshell, Ratcliffe suggested that Obama CIA Director John Brennan’s 2023 House testimony — that the CIA opposed inclusion of the bogus Steele dossier in the ICA — was inconsistent with emails Brennan had sent seven years earlier, as the ICA was being prepared, in which he argued in favor of the dossier’s inclusion in the ICA. On even cursory examination, this was specious. In the 2016 emails, Brennan was arguing his personal position; by contrast, his 2023 testimony laid out the CIA’s institutional position, which was against the dossier’s inclusion. Not only is the 2023 testimony true; it is proven true by the 2016 emails, which were in response to top CIA officials (including Brennan’s deputy), who asserted that the agency broadly opposed inclusion of the dossier. (Brennan’s colleagues largely succeeded in having it excluded: a streamlined summary was included in an annex but not in the ICA’s analysis.) To repeat what I posited, a false-statements case cannot be based on true statements (even if we assume, as I do, that Brennan was being cagey in the 2023 testimony). There is, therefore, no basis in the new CIA report for an investigation of Brennan. (Ratcliffe reportedly also recommended that the DOJ investigate James Comey, the Obama-appointed FBI director later fired by Trump, though it’s unclear why.)
Gabbard’s press release attempts the same kind of legerdemain. She claims that in the run-up to and the immediate aftermath of the 2016 election, Obama intelligence officials, including then-DNI James Clapper, took the position that Russia was “probably not trying . . . to influence the election by using cyber means.” But later, as top Obama administration officials huddled and executed the rapid-fire completion of the ICA, Gabbard says the administration changed its tune and claimed that Russia had used cyber means to interfere in the election.
It’s a frivolous argument. The original (and true) claims that Russia was not engaged in cyber espionage were unambiguously referring to cyberattacks on election infrastructure. Try as she might, even Gabbard cannot get around this in the press release and the selectively redacted documents she released — e.g., Clapper’s December 7, 2016, statement: “Foreign adversaries did not use cyberattacks on election infrastructure to alter the US Presidential election outcome” (emphasis added). This is true: No one believed that Russian operatives had tried to attack election machines and the like. As officials explained post-election, the U.S. presidential contest involves 50 state elections that use various, redundant measures to prevent the possibility of hacking; even a regime with capable intelligence services, such as Russia’s, could not manipulate the results through cyberattacks.
Nonexistent cyber intrusions on election infrastructure are different, not just in degree but in kind, from what the Obama intelligence officials settled on, which was that Russia had conducted cyberattacks (1) to hack the DNC emails and (2) to promote anti-Clinton political messaging. The fact that the Obama officials claimed that Russia was responsible for those operations is not contradicted by those same officials’ admission that Russia didn’t conduct cyber ops against voting machines.
It’s not enough to say that the CIA’s recently released “lessons learned” report concludes that the ICA’s “high confidence” that Russia interfered in the election was well-founded through proper and extensive intelligence tradecraft. As Gabbard must know, the Obama Justice Department and FBI went to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in October 2016 — two months before the ICA was completed — to obtain FISA surveillance warrants against former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page. The Obama administration’s application represented that Russia was interfering in the 2016 election, possibly with Trump’s collusion, by (1) hacking the DNC and (2) standing ready to publicize hacked information that would be damaging to Clinton.
To be sure, the FISA application relied on the dossier and was appallingly shoddy. That said, it demonstrates that, even before the election (and weeks before the ICA), Obama intelligence officials had a cyber-espionage theory of Russian interference that focused on hacking and campaign messaging, not election infrastructure. Gabbard’s allegation that his theory was concocted post-election is obviously wrong.
Toward the conclusion of Gabbard’s press release comes this thundering claptrap:
After months of investigation into this matter, the facts reveal this new assessment [i.e., the ICA] was based on information that was known by those involved to be manufactured i.e. the Steele Dossier or deemed as not credible. This was politicized intelligence that was used as the basis for countless smears seeking to delegitimize President Trump’s victory, the years-long Mueller investigation, two Congressional impeachments, high level officials being investigated, arrested, and thrown in jail, heightened US-Russia tensions, and more.
Down here on Planet Earth, the use of the Steele dossier has been roundly condemned in government investigations (as it was in Ratcliffe’s new report). The Mueller probe, despite being staffed by anti-Trump partisans, concluded that there was no evidence of Trump-Russia collusion and did not delve into the dossier and the FISA debacle. No one who was prosecuted as a result of the Mueller investigation was charged with offenses related to the Steele dossier or the ICA. Trump’s two impeachments pertained to Ukraine and the Capitol riot — neither had anything to do with Russiagate or the 2016 ICA. And while it is characteristic of Gabbard to blame the United States for “heightened US-Russia tensions,” they have in fact been heightened because of Russia’s annexation of its neighbors’ territories and the monstrous war crimes it has committed in Ukraine.
DNI Gabbard concludes by assuring us: “The issue I am raising is not a partisan issue.” Well, that’s a relief.