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** Gabbard Distorts the Facts in 'Coup' Claim About Obama Administration
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On July 18, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard released 114 pages of newly unsealed intelligence documents, which she organized into a timeline to support her claim that President Barack Obama and his national security team “manufactured and politicized intelligence to lay the groundwork for what was essentially a years-long coup against President Trump.”

FactCheck.org Deputy Director Rob Farley reviewed the documents to see if they provided the “overwhelming evidence” of wrongdoing that Gabbard claimed they did.

At the heart of her case, as Gabbard laid out in an interview on Fox News on July 22, is her assertion that the documents showed, “There was a shift, a 180-degree shift, from the intelligence community’s assessment leading up to the election to the one that President Obama directed be produced after Donald Trump won the election that completely contradicted those assessments that had come previously.”

As Rob wrote, that’s a misleading premise.

Gabbard claimed specifically that there was a contradiction between a Jan. 6, 2017, intelligence assessment that Russian President Vladimir Putin had ordered an “influence campaign” in an attempt to help elect Donald Trump and earlier intelligence assessments that concluded Russia did not successfully use cyberattacks on election infrastructure in the 2016 election. But those two assessments are not in contradiction.

The earlier reports referred specifically to Russian attempts to hack or otherwise compromise voting infrastructure. That’s different from the January 2017 assessment that Russians had sought to influence the 2016 election via a sophisticated social media campaign in support of Trump’s candidacy and the hack and public release of material from the Democratic National Committee’s computer network.

Several subsequent and exhaustive reviews of the Intelligence Community’s assessment corroborated its conclusions about the Russian influence campaign.

Indeed, the special counsel inquiry headed by Robert S. Mueller ’s office secured an indictment in February 2018 against 13 Russian nationals and three Russian entities for their role in that interference. In July of that year, 12 Russian military officers were also indicted.

And a report from a bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee released in April 2020 concluded the Intelligence Community had presented “a coherent and well-constructed intelligence basis for the case of unprecedented Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.”

One of the members of the committee was then Sen. Marco Rubio, now Trump’s secretary of state, who said at the time the Senate committee’s “thorough investigation” had found “irrefutable evidence of Russian meddling.”

To read more about our review of Gabbard’s allegations, see our full story: “Gabbard’s Misleading ‘Coup’ Claim ([link removed]) .”

HOW WE KNOW
On July 18, the Department of Health and Human Services said that the U.S. was formally rejecting amendments to the World Health Organization’s International Health Regulations, claiming the revised IHR “would give the WHO the ability to order global lockdowns” and “travel restrictions” in response to a pandemic. The statement, and remarks by HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., echoed claims we wrote about before that exaggerated the power of the WHO. We examined the revised IHR and interviewed global health law experts, who told us the claims were “entirely untrue” and “clearly” incorrect. Read more: “RFK Jr., HHS Wrong About WHO Power Under Updated Global Health Regulations ([link removed]) .”
FEATURED FACTS
In June, the federal government recorded a roughly $27 billion budget surplus. The most recent monthly surplus before that was in April, when government revenue exceeded its expenditures by about $258 billion, according to the Treasury Department ([link removed]) . Most recently before that, there were six months with surpluses during the Biden administration (January 2022, April 2022, April 2023, August 2023, April 2024 and September 2024). Surpluses regularly occur in April, because of Tax Day. Despite the two monthly surpluses this year, as of June, the U.S. still had an overall budget deficit of more than $1.3 trillion through the first nine months of fiscal year 2025. Read more: “Trump’s Hollow Surplus Claim ([link removed]) .”
REPLY ALL
Reader: Trump claims that the tariffs he imposed have brought over $100 billion into the U.S. economy. True or false?

FactCheck.org Staff Writer D'Angelo Gore: As of June, the federal government had received more than $108 billion from tariffs, or customs duties, paid by U.S. importers, according to ([link removed]) Treasury Department data for fiscal year 2025. In addition, as of July 23, the U.S. had collected about $27 billion ([link removed]) in customs and excise taxes in July.

However, not all of that revenue is from Trump's second-term tariffs on imported foreign goods, as the president's July 16 remarks ([link removed]) may have suggested. Fiscal year 2025 began Oct. 1 and includes more than three months under Joe Biden, who also increased certain tariffs as president. We made that point in a June 23 story ([link removed]) about a different claim that Trump made about revenue from tariff payments.

It was in April that revenue began to increase significantly because of tariffs that Trump put in place this year. That month the government got $15.6 billion ([link removed]) from tariffs, a 91% increase from the March total. Then in May, the amount increased to almost $22.2 billion, and in June it was about $26.6 billion. Those were all new record months for tariff revenue.

The Monthly Treasury Statement with the July total for revenue exclusively from tariffs will be available ([link removed]) in early August.
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