US Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has released a previously classified report which she says points to a “treasonous conspiracy” to undermine the results of the 2016 presidential election.
The House Intelligence Committee document takes issue with the conclusion, reached by numerous intelligence reports including one by the CIA, that Russia sought to help Donald Trump in that election.
Gabbard appeared at the White House on Wednesday and said the report reveals “egregious weaponisation and politicisation of intelligence”.
Democrats said the White House is trying to distract from the ongoing controversy surrounding its decision not to publish files relating to Jeffrey Epstein.
“It seems as though the Trump administration is willing to declassify anything and everything except the Epstein files,” Democratic Senator Mark Warner said, adding that a bipartisan Senate report had backed the CIA’s conclusions about Russia favouring Trump.
The report Gabbard declassified was prepared by Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee and is dated 18 September 2020.
It was declassified on Wednesday, a day after President Trump accused former President Barack Obama of leading an effort to falsely tie him to Russia and undermine his 2016 election campaign.
“These bizarre allegations are ridiculous and a weak attempt at distraction,” a spokesperson for Obama said in response on Tuesday.
Last week, Gabbard threatened to refer Obama administration officials to the justice department for prosecution for their actions in 2016 but offered little detail on any alleged crimes.
The declassified report says the CIA “did not adhere to the tenets” of analytic standards and used “one scant, unclear, and unverifiable fragment of a sentence from one of the substandard reports” to conclude that Russia’s Vladimir Putin wanted Trump to win.
There is little evidence in the document, however, that challenges the prevailing view in US intelligence that Russia sought to influence the vote in favour of Trump.
Among the key authors of the report was Kash Patel, who is now Trump’s FBI director.
In a surprise appearance at the White House press briefing alongside Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt on Wednesday, Gabbard said the document – along with another document released on Friday – presented “irrefutable evidence” that Obama and other officials “directed the creation of an intelligence community assessment they knew was false”.
“They knew it would promote this contrived narrative that Russia interfered in the 2016 election to help President Trump,” she said.
Democrats have condemned the allegations, with many suggesting Trump is seeking to divert attention away from mounting calls to release more information about Jeffrey Epstein, who died by suicide in a New York prison cell in 2019 while he was awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges.
“I think they do not want to talk about Jeffrey Epstein,” Arizona Democratic Senator Mark Kelly told reporters. “They fed into this conspiracy theory and now they want to run away from it.”
Gabbard has filed a criminal referral on the case to the justice department, directly implicating Obama, over what she described as a “years-long coup and treasonous conspiracy against the American people”.
In response to a question about Epstein on Tuesday, Trump responded that “the witchhunt you should be talking about is they caught President Obama absolutely cold.”
“It’s there, he’s guilty. This was treason,” he said.
Patrick Rodenbush, a spokesman for former President Barack Obama, said in a statement earlier this week that no released information “undercuts the widely accepted conclusion that Russia worked to influence the 2016 presidential election but did not successfully manipulate any votes”.
The US intelligence community published an assessment in January 2017 concluding that Russia had sought to damage Hillary Clinton’s campaign and boost Trump in the vote three months earlier.
US officials found this effort had included Russian bot farms on social media and hacking of Democratic emails, but they ultimately concluded the impact was probably limited and did not actually change the election result.
A 2020 bipartisan report by the Senate intelligence committee also found that Russia had tried to help Trump’s 2016 campaign.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who was a senator at the time, was among the Republicans who co-signed that report.
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