Gabbard Distorts the Facts in 'Coup' Claim About Obama Administration
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.”
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