The Russians privately felt it was “inevitable” that Hillary Clinton would triumph in the 2016 election, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard said on Miranda Devine’s “Pod Force One” podcast.
Despite widespread narratives that Russia was in President Trump’s corner, Moscow’s objective was to sow chaos in the American political process and brace itself for a Clinton presidency, Gabbard claimed, citing the trove of intelligence documents her team has released.
“It surprised me that all of these documents still existed, quite frankly,” Gabbard said in an episode set for release Wednesday. “As we’ve learned in later documents that we’ve reviewed throughout that campaign, Russia believed that Hillary Clinton would win the election.
“They felt it was inevitable.”
Last month, Gabbard’s team began disclosing a trove of documents that gave a behind-the-scenes look at the intelligence community’s machinations during the 2016 election cycle regarding the probe of Russian interference.
This included a House Intelligence Committee report from 2020 that claimed the Russians may have had intelligence that Clinton was “placed on a daily regimen of ‘heavy tranquilizers’ and while afraid of losing.”
That was supposedly due to her alleged “psycho-emotional problems, including uncontrolled fits of anger, aggression, and cheerfulness.”
Gabbard pondered why that supposed Russian intelligence wasn’t leaked to the public if Moscow’s chief objective was to prop up Trump and undermine Clinton.
“If Russia aspired to help Trump get elected, which is what the manufactured January 2017 intelligence community assessment says with high confidence, according to Brennan and Clapper, then Putin would have released the most damaging information and emails to help President Trump,” she said.
“It was intentionally withheld and not released because they assumed that Hillary Clinton would win that
election, and their plan,” Gabbard added, citing the 2020 House Intelligence Committee report, “[was to] wait until maybe days or weeks before her inauguration to release these documents.”
The Russians were widely alleged by US officials to have hacked Democratic National Committee emails during he 2016 campaign.
The 2020 House Intelligence Committee report had concluded that Russian strongman Vladimir Putin’s “principal motivations in these operations were to undermine faith in the US democratic process” and that he didn’t necessarily prioritize propping up one candidate over the other.
“The American people, I think, have been, and our republic, has been most harmed by this,” Gabbard said of the Russia collusion narrative. “Of course, President Trump went through hell and his family because of this Russia hoax that was manufactured by President Obama and his administration.”
Critics such as former CIA Director John Brennan and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper accused Gabbard of peddling “patently false” accusations about their Russiagate activities.
Much of what Gabbard has released centered around rebuffing a 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA), which concluded among other things that “the Russian Government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump.”
Brennan, Clapper and others have pointed to a 2020 bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee report, which noted the panel “heard consistently that analysts were under no politically motivated pressure to reach specific conclusions.”
Clapper and Brennan recenty penned an op-ed insisting that the intelligence community report never referenced “collusion” between Trump and the Russian government, and stood by their claims that the Kremlin prefered him in the 2016 election.
Tulsi Gabbard’s Russiagate claims
Tulsi Gabbard’s claims of election interference focus on the controversial 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment, which President Barack Obama ordered his intel chiefs to compile.
The report fueled the Russiagate investigations against President Trump. Gabbard alleges it amounted to a political hit job, claiming Obama officials knowingly used shaky intel and then lied about it.
Gabbard’s new claims are based on a 2020 House Intelligence Committee report, which she has publicly released. Its findings differ in some key ways from both the Obama report and a previously released Senate Intelligence Committee report.
Democrats, however, point to the Senate report, which was backed by then-Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) — now Trump’s secretary of state. That supports some of the findings of the Obama report.
Here are the biggest points — and what the dueling intel reports say:
The Steele dossier
- The House report contradicts the claims of Obama officials that they never relied on the discredited Steele dossier — which was compiled by Hillary Clinton’s campaign — as part of the Russiagate investigation.
- In a 2017 House hearing, Obama CIA Director John Brennan denied that his agency used the Steele dossier for intelligence assessments.
- However, the full Steele dossier was still included as an attachment to the Obama intel report, the newly public House report found.
- Additionally, according to the House report, Brennan, FBI Director James Comey and Deputy Director Andrew McCabe pushed to use the Steele dossier for the Obama intel report.
- Senior intel officials also confronted Brennan about the legitimacy of the Steele dossier, the House report said, but he shrugged it off. Brennan’s response was reportedly, “Yes, but doesn’t it ring true?”
- The Senate investigation found that the Steele dossier was not used as part of the Obama intel report.
Obama’s involvement
- Gabbard claimed Wednesday that Obama ordered the creation of the 2017 intel report and suggested it “was subject to unusual directives directly from the president and senior political appointees.” She added: “Obama directed an intelligence community assessment to be created, to further this contrived false narrative that ultimately led to a year-long coup to try to undermine President Trump’s presidency.”
- The 2020 Senate intel report confirmed that Obama ordered the report to be drafted, but did not comment on the political motivations.
- Obama said that “the bizarre allegations are ridiculous and a weak attempt at distraction.”
Did Putin want Trump to win?
- The Obama report said that “Russia’s goals were to undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability” and that Putin had a “clear preference for President-elect Trump.”
- But the House report contradicted this, saying that Putin’s “principal motivations in these operations were to undermine faith in the US democratic process.” The Russian strongman also seemed to expect Clinton to win, and held back on “some compromising material for post-election use against the expected Clinton administration.”
- The Senate report said lawmakers were given “specific intelligence reporting to support the assessment that Putin and the Russian Government demonstrated a preference for candidate Trump.”
Did Russia alter the 2016 election?
- To buttress her claims that the Obama intel report was political interference, she highlighted the findings of multiple intelligence agencies that Russia “had neither the intent nor capability to impact the outcome of the US election.”
- On this, all three reports are in agreement.
Gabbard pointed to how Obama ordered the 2017 ICA of Russian interference in the 2016 election and his administration’s machinations detailed in the document dump to accuse the 44th president of subversion.
“What we now know came from President Obama was a covert mission, essentially, to subvert the will of the American people, create this lie that would challenge the legitimacy of President Trump’s election and the four years of his administration, resulting and affecting in what was truly a years’ long coup,” Gabbard said.
Reps from Obama have refuted those characterizations, saying that the “bizarre allegations are ridiculous and a weak attempt at distraction.”
“Nothing in the document issued last week undercuts the widely accepted conclusion that Russia worked to influence the 2016 presidential election but did not successfully manipulate any votes,” Obama spokesperson Patrick Rodenbush said in a statement last month.
Gabbard made referrals to the Justice Department based on her findings, and the DOJ has since formed a “strike force” to comb through the claims.
