A former CIA officer who helped lead the intelligence assessments over alleged Russia interference in the 2016 presidential election has said Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, is ignorant of the practices of espionage after she accused Barack Obama and his national security team of “treasonous conspiracy” against Donald Trump.
Susan Miller, the agency’s head of counter-intelligence at the time of the election, told the Guardian that Gabbard’s allegations were based on false statements and basic misrepresentations of discoveries made by Miller’s team about Russian actions, which she insisted that were based on multiple trusted and verified sources.
Gabbard has accused Obama and his former national security officials of “manufacturing” intelligence to make it appear that Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, had intervened on Trump’s side when they knew it was untrue. The goal, she insisted, was to make Trump’s election win appear illegitimate, thus laying the basis of a “years-long coup against him”.
She has passed the matter to Pam Bondi, the attorney general, who last week announced a justice department “strike force” into the affair. However, reports have suggested that Bondi was caught off guard by Gabbard’s request that her department examine the matter.
Gabbard has called for criminal prosecutions against numerous officials involved, including Obama himself.
Obama last week denounced the allegations as “outrageous and ridiculous”, and part of an attempt to distract attention from the Jeffrey Epstein files, in which Trump’s name reportedly appears.
None of the other high-level officials named in Gabbard’s recent report – including James Clapper, her predecessor as national intelligence director, John Brennan, the former CIA director, or the ex-FBI director James Comey – have responded publicly to her allegations.
But in an interview, Miller – who is not named in the national intelligence director’s public narrative – questioned Gabbard’s grasp of intelligence matters.
Gabbard, who has never worked on the House intelligence committee while she was a member of Congress, has criticized the “tradecraft” of agents who compiled the assessment of Russia’s election activities.
“Has she ever met a Russian agent?” asked Miller, a 39-year agency veteran who served tours as CIA chief of station abroad. “Has she ever given diamonds to a Russian who’s giving us, you know? Has she ever walked on the streets of Moscow to do a dead drop? Has she ever handled an agent?
“No. She’s never done any of that. She clearly doesn’t understand this.”
Miller told the Guardian she was speaking out because Gabbard’s claims besmirched her work and and that of her team of up to eight members who worked on the Russia case.
“My reputation and my team’s reputation is on the line,” she said. “Tulsi comes out and doesn’t use my name, doesn’t use the names of the people in my team, but basically says this was all wrong and made up, et cetera.”
Miller and her former team members have recently hired lawyers to defend themselves against charges that could put them in jail.
Miller has hired Mark Zaid, a prominent Washington defense attorney, to represent her.
The scenario reprises a situation she faced in 2017, when – still a serving officer – Miller hired a $1,500-an-hour lawyer to represent her after being told she might face criminal charges for her part in authoring the same intelligence report now being scrutinized by Gabbard.
Investigators interviewed her for up to eight hours as part of a trawl to ferret out possible law-breaking under Obama that eventually that culminated in Bill Barr, the attorney general in Trump’s first administration, appointing a special counsel, John Durham, to conduct an inquiry into the FBI’s investigation of links between the Trump campaign and Russia.
“They were asking things like: ‘Who told you to write this and who told you to come to these conclusions?’,” Miller recalled.
“I told them: ‘Nobody did. If anybody had told us to come to certain conclusions, all of us would have quit. There’s no way, all none of us ever had a reputation for falsifying anything, before anything or after.’”
No charges were brought against her, but nor was she told the case was closed.
Durham’s 2023 report concluded that the FBI should never have launched its full investigation, titled “crossfire hurricane” into the alleged Trump-Russia links. But his four-year investigation was something of a disappointment to Trump and his supporters, bringing just three criminal prosecutions, resulting in a single conviction – of an FBI lawyer who admitted to altering an email to support a surveillance application.
It is this ground that is now being re-covered by Gabbard in what may be a Trump-inspired bid for “retribution” against political enemies who he has accused of subjecting him to a political witch-hunt.
But the crusade, Miller says, is underpinned by false premise – that the Russia interference findings were a “hoax”, a description long embraced by Trump and repeated by Gabbard in her 18 July report.
“It is not a hoax,” she said. “This was based on real intelligence. It’s reporting we were getting from verified agents and from other verified streams of intelligence.
“It was so clear [the Russians] were doing that, that it was never in issue back in 2016. It’s only an issue now because Tulsi wants it to be.”
Briefing journalists at the White House last week, Gabbard cited a 2020 House of Representatives intelligence committee report – supported only by its Republican members – asserting that Putin’s goal in the election was to “undermine faith in the US democratic process, not showing any preference of a certain candidate”.
Miller dismissed that. “The information led us to the correct conclusion that [the interference] was in Trump’s favor – the Republican party and Trump’s favor,” she said. Indeed, Putin himself – standing alongside Trump at a news conference during a summit meeting in Helsinki in 2018 – confirmed to journalists that he had wanted his US counterpart to win.
Rebuffing suggestions that she or her team may be guilty of pro-Democrat bias, she said she was a registered Republican voter. Her team consisted of Republicans, Democrats and “centrists,” she said.
Gabbard has claimed that agents were pressured – at Obama’s instigation – into fabricating intelligence in the weeks after Trump’s victory, allegedly to raise questions about its electoral legitimacy and weaken his presidency.
“BS [bullshit]. That’s not true,” said Miller. “This had to do with our sources and what they were finding. It had nothing to do with Obama telling us to do this. We found it, and we’re like, what do we do with this?”
At the core of Gabbard’s critique are two assertions that Miller says conflates separate issues.
One is based on media reports of briefings from Obama administration officials a month after Trump’s victory, including one claiming that Russia used “cyber products” to influence “the outcome of the election”. Gabbard writes that this is contradicted by Obama’s admission that there was no “evidence of [voting] machines being tampered with” to alter the vote tally, meaning that the eventual assessment finding of Russian interference must be false.
Miller dismisses that as a red herring, since the CIA’s assessment – ultimately endorsed by other intelligence agencies – was never based on assumptions of election machine hacking.
“That’s not where [the Russians] were trying to do it,” she said. “They were trying to do it through covert action of press pieces, internet pieces, things like that. The DNC [Democratic National Committee] hack [when Russian hackers also penetrated the emails of Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta, and passed them to WikiLeaks] … is [also] part of it.
“That’s why we came out with the conclusion that 100% the Russians tried to influence the election on Trump’s part, [but] 100%, unless we polled every voter, we can’t tell if it worked. If we’d known anything about election machines, it would have been a very different thing.”
Miller also refuted Gabbard’s claim that the intelligence community’s “high level of confidence” in Russian interference had been bolstered by “‘further information” that turned out to be an unverified dossier written by Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence officer, which suggested possible collusion between Russia and Trump.
“We never used the Steele dossier in our report,” she said. The dossier – which included salacious allegations about Trump and Russian sex workers – created a media sensation when it was published without permission in January 2017 days before Trump’s inauguration.
Miller said it was only included in an annexe to the intelligence assessment released in the same month on the insistence of Comey, the FBI director, who had told his CIA counterpart, Brennan, that the bureau would not sign off on the rest of the report if it was excluded.
“We never saw it until our report was 99.99% finished and about to go to print. We didn’t care about it or really understand it or where it had come from. It was too poorly written and non-understandable.
“But we were told it had to be included or the FBI wouldn’t endorse our report. So it was put in as an addendum with a huge cover sheet on it, written by me and a team member, which said something like: ‘We are attaching this document, the Steele dossier, to this report at the request of the FBI director; it is unevaluated and not corroborated by CIA at this time.’”
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