Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard spoke to reporters at the White House on Wednesday on the heels of the latest document drop alleging Obama administration officials misled the public about intelligence surrounding Russian interference in the 2016 election.
Gabbard made a rare appearance in the briefing room, a sign the White House is seeking to keep a spotlight on the claims her office has levied about former President Obama and some of his intelligence officials.
Here are five takeaways from the briefing.
House report offers fresh fodder
Gabbard’s appearance coincided with her office’s release of a previously classified report from the House Intelligence Committee that was first drafted in 2017 and published in 2020.
Gabbard said one key finding was that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s “principal interests” around the 2016 election were to “undermine faith in the U.S. democratic process, not show preference of a certain candidate.”
“In fact, this report shows Putin held back leaking…compromising material on Hillary Clinton prior to the election, instead planning to release it after the election to weaken what Moscow viewed as an inevitable Clinton presidency,” Gabbard said.
The House report determined the CIA “did not adhere to the tenets” of analytic standards and said the conclusion that Putin took actions to benefit Trump was based on “one scant, unclear, and unverifiable fragment of a sentence from one of the substandard reports.”
Gabbard argued the report was particularly damning for former President Obama, CIA Director John Brennan, former FBI Director James Comey and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper.
But critics quickly panned the report as out of step with intelligence community findings and the findings of a bipartisan report from the Senate Intelligence Committee released in 2020, which both established that Russia attempted to interfere in the 2016 election and preferred Trump to win.
“Nothing in this partisan, previously scuttled document changes that. Releasing this so-called report is just another reckless act by a Director of National Intelligence so desperate to please Donald Trump that she is willing to risk classified sources, betray our allies, and politicize the very intelligence she has been entrusted to protect,” Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said in a statement.
Gabbard suggests Obama implicated
Former President Obama’s name was uttered nearly a dozen times at Wednesday’s briefing as Gabbard and other officials have suggested Trump’s predecessor was directly involved in efforts to mislead the public.
“We have referred and will continue to refer all of these documents to the Department of Justice and the FBI to investigate the criminal implications of this,” Gabbard said when asked if any of the information released Wednesday implicates Obama in criminal behavior.
“The evidence that we have found and that we have released directly points to President Obama leading the manufacturing of this intelligence assessment. There are multiple pieces of evidence and intelligence that confirm that fact,” Gabbard added.
President Trump had a day earlier accused Obama of treason, prompting a rare public rebuke from the former president’s office.
“Out of respect for the office of the presidency, our office does not normally dignify the constant nonsense and misinformation flowing out of this White House with a response,” Obama spokesperson Patrick Rodenbush said in a statement. “But these claims are outrageous enough to merit one. These 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. These findings were affirmed in a 2020 report by the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee, led by then-Chairman Marco Rubio, who now serves as Trump’s secretary of State.
Officials sidestep questions about consequences
Gabbard and White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt repeatedly dodged when pressed on what crime Obama could be charged with or whether he should go to jail for something he did related to the handling of Russian interference in the 2016 election.
“I’m leaving the criminal charges to the DOJ. I’m not an attorney,” Gabbard when asked if Obama is guilty of treason, despite previously claiming his administration’s actions amounted to a “treasonous conspiracy.”
She also deflected to the Justice Department when asked what Obama could be charged with given the statute of limitations on conspiracy would have expired.
Press secretary Karoline Leavitt repeatedly called for accountability for those who committed wrongdoing.
NBC News correspondent Kelly O’Donnell asked what that would mean given a previous special counsel, John Durham, did not charge Obama or his top aides when he could have, and the Supreme Court has ruled presidents have broad immunity for acts while in office.
“The president has made it clear that he wanted these documents to be declassified, he wanted the American people to see the truth and now he wants those who perpetuated these lies and this scandal to be held accountable,” Leavitt said.
“As for what accountability looks like…it’s in the Department of Justice’s hands, and we trust them to move this ball forward,” Leavitt said.
White House addresses questions about Rubio, Gabbard
Skeptics of the Trump administration’s allegations about the Russia documents have noted that Secretary of State Marco Rubio, a staunch Trump ally, was among the members of the Senate Intelligence Committee when it issued its bipartisan report in 2020.
Democrats and other critics have pointed to Rubio’s support for those conclusions to question the administration’s new allegations and why someone like the secretary of State would not have raised them previously.
Leavitt largely sidestepped the question. She noted that Rubio issued a statement in 2020 describing Russia’s attempts to meddle in the election and actions taken by the FBI as “troubling.”
CNN’s Kaitlan Collins also asked whether Gabbard’s release of multiple reports about Russian interference, a long-standing fixation for Trump, was meant as a way to get back in his good graces after he publicly criticized her last month.
“The only people who are suggesting that the director of national intelligence would release evidence to try to boost her standing with the president are the people in this room who constantly try to sow distrust and chaos among the president’s Cabinet. And it’s not working,” Leavitt said.
Trump “has the utmost confidence in Director Gabbard, he always has, he continues to,” Leavitt added.
Trump had previously publicly criticized Gabbard and said he disagreed with her assessments about Iran’s pursuit of a nuclear weapon in June as he mulled strikes on Iranian nuclear sites.
Questions about politicization and weaponization
Gabbard has spoken frequently about her efforts to eliminate politicization from the intelligence community in her role as director of national intelligence, and Trump administration officials have repeatedly argued the government was weaponized against the president in his various criminal cases.
But the intelligence director on Wednesday faced multiple questions about whether she was merely adding to the politicization by making grave allegations of wrongdoing against Obama officials, and about whether the documents released by her office conflated different issues.
“I think that’s a very disrespectful attack on the American people who deserve the truth,” Gabbard said, brushing off a question about whether a referral of the former president was “a potential race to the bottom.”
Gabbard similarly attacked Obama in response to a question about whether she was conflating allegations that Russia actually hacked the election or changed results with allegations of Russian attempts to meddle and sow distrust.
“I think it’s a disservice to the American people that former President Obama’s office and others who are criticizing the transparency that is being delivered by releasing these documents,” Gabbard said. “They are doing a disservice to the American people in trying to deflect away from their culpability in what is a historic scandal.
