National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard released a report in a previous classification, which she said showed that a “treason plot” undermined the outcome of the 2016 presidential election.
House Intelligence Committee documents questioned the conclusions, including a CIA intelligence report, which Russia tried to help Donald Trump participate in the election.
Gabbard appeared at the White House on Wednesday and said the report revealed “weaponization and politicization of intelligence.”
Democrats say the White House is trying to disperse ongoing controversy surrounding its decision not to release documents related to Jeffrey Epstein.
“It seems that the Trump administration is willing to explain everything except Epstein’s application,” said Democratic Senator Mark Warner, who added that the bipartisan Senate report supported the CIA’s conclusion that Russia favored Trump.
Gabbard’s declassified report was prepared by Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee and dated September 18, 2020.
President Trump accused former President Barack Obama of working to connect him to Russia and undermine his 2016 campaign the day after it was declassified Wednesday.
“These weird allegations are ridiculous and a weak attempt to distract from the attention,” an Obama spokesman said Tuesday.
Last week, Gabbard threatened to refer Obama administration officials to the Justice Department to file a lawsuit to take action in 2016, but there was little detail about any suspected crime.
The declassified report said the CIA “did not comply with the tenet of analytical standards” and used “a trivial, unclear and unverifiable fragment of a sentence from the nonconforming report” to conclude that Russia’s Vladimir Putin wanted Trump to win.
However, there is little evidence in the document that widespread view in U.S. intelligence challenges Russia’s attempt to influence the view that votes for Trump.
One of the main authors of the report is Kash Patel, who is now Trump’s FBI director.
During an unexpected surprise at the White House press conference Wednesday with press secretary Karoline Leavitt, Gabbard said the document — and another document released Friday — provided “unreasonable evidence” that Obama and other officials “instructed the creation of the intelligence community assessment that they knew was wrong.”
“They know that this will promote this artificial narrative of Russian interference in the 2016 election to help President Trump,” she said.
Democrats have condemned the allegations, with many suggesting Trump is seeking to shift his attention to a growing call to post more information about Jeffrey Epstein, who died in a New York prison cell in 2019 while awaiting trial on a sex trafficking charge.
“I don’t think they want to talk about Jeffrey Epstein,” Sen. Mark Kelly, Democrat of Arizona, told reporters. “They’re infuriated with this conspiracy theory and now they want to get rid of it.”
Gabbard has submitted the case to the Justice Department, directly involving Obama, who described “years of coup and treason plots against the American people.”
To answer Tuesday’s question about Epstein, Trump replied: “The witch you should talk about is that they were caught President Obama is absolutely cold.”
He said: “He was guilty there. It was a treason.”
Patrick Rodenbush, a spokesman for former President Barack Obama, said in a statement earlier this week that no information was released “destroyed Russia’s efforts to influence the widely accepted conclusions of the 2016 presidential election, but failed to successfully manipulate any votes”.
The U.S. intelligence community released an assessment in January 2017, concluding that Russia was trying to undermine Hillary Clinton’s campaign and promoted Trump in a vote three months ago.
U.S. officials found that the work included hacking on Russian robot farms and democratic emails on social media, but they eventually concluded that the impact could be limited and did not actually change the election results.
The Senate Intelligence Committee’s bipartisan report for 2020 also found Russia trying to help Trump’s 2016 campaign.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who was then a Senator, was one of the Republicans who signed the report.
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