CNN
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When President Donald Trump sided with Vladimir Putin over his own intelligence community on the topic of Russia’s interference in the 2016 US election, then-Sen. Marco Rubio sharply rebuked Trump.
The Florida Republican said in 2018 that the intelligence community’s “assessment of 2016 is accurate. It’s 100% accurate. The Russians interfered in our elections.”
He added: “I think it was not a good moment for the administration, obviously. Hopefully, something like that never happens again.”
But seven years later, it just keeps happening — over and over again — as Trump and his most loyal allies seek to sow doubts about that 2016 episode and punish their political enemies. That’s now taken the form of Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard threatening criminal referrals and even floating allegations of treason for key officials in the Obama administration.
Her argument is full of holes, as even critics of the Russia investigation such as the National Review’s Andrew McCarthy have noted. (Basically, the whole thing conflates Russia’s attempts to influence the 2016 election with nonexistent attacks on election infrastructure that changed votes. )
But just as notable is that Gabbard’s move to cast doubt on Russia’s 2016 interference is wholly at odds with several top Trump administration officials, most especially Rubio, along with a pair of congressional investigations spearheaded by Republicans.
To be clear, Gabbard is basically suggesting there was no Russian interference.
Her memo last week cited what it cast as false reporting “that the CIA ‘concluded in a secret assessment that Russia intervened’ in the election to help President Trump.”
The memo said the assessment “falsely alleges … that Putin directed an effort to help President Trump defeat Hillary Clinton.”
Gabbard in Fox News interviews accused the Obama team of ordering a “a manufactured piece of intelligence that detailed not if, but how Russia tried to influence the outcome of the United States election.” She cited an intelligence document that purportedly said Russia “did not attempt to affect the outcome of the election.”
In fact, that document — a President’s Daily Brief, or his daily intelligence report — merely said Russia hadn’t impacted the election results “by conducting malicious cyber activities against election infrastructure.”
It was referring narrowly to a very specific (and severe) type of potential election interference. The Obama administration never alleged such interference took place or that Russia manipulated actual votes that were cast.
This is a kind of sleight of hand we’ve seen before with Trump allies trying to call Russia’s election interference into question.
But Gabbard’s commentary is especially striking when juxtaposed with those she serves with in the second Trump administration.
Rubio didn’t just rebuke Trump for siding with Putin’s denials back in 2018; he also spearheaded the Senate Intelligence Committee’s big, bipartisan Russia report in 2020.
The report concluded that Russia had “engaged in an aggressive, multi-faceted effort to influence, or attempt to influence, the outcome of the 2016 presidential election.”
It not only said Russia had interfered, but also that it had done so to benefit Trump.
“The Committee found that Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the Russian effort to hack computer networks and accounts affiliated with the Democratic Party and leak information damaging to Hillary Clinton and her campaign for president,” the report said. “Moscow’s intent was to harm the Clinton Campaign, tarnish an expected Clinton presidential administration, help the Trump Campaign after Trump became the presumptive Republican nominee, and undermine the U.S. democratic process.”
The report differed slightly from a similar report from the House Intelligence Committee in 2018. The House report, which was written by Republicans, did not say that Russia aimed to help Trump, but it did say it interfered and that Putin had ordered it.
“In 2015, Russia began engaging in a covert influence campaign aimed at the U.S. presidential election,” the Republican-led House report said. “The Russia government, at the direction of President Vladimir Putin, sought to sow discord in American society and undermine our faith in the democratic process.”
Gabbard, who was a Democratic member of Congress until 2021, now suggestively casts all three of these pillars as false: that Russia interfered, that Putin ordered it, and that it was meant to help Trump.
And her conclusions also run afoul of other Trump administration members’ statements.
During his 2020 confirmation hearing to become Trump’s director of national intelligence, now-CIA Director John Ratcliffe — who then served on the House Intelligence Committee — made clear Russia interfered.
“Chairman, my views are that Russia meddled in or interfered with active measures in 2016,” Ratcliffe said. “They interfered in 2018. They will attempt to do so in 2020. They have a goal of sowing discord, and they have been successful in sowing discord.”
Even just days before Gabbard launched her effort last week, Ratcliffe issued a report that not only didn’t dispute that Russia interfered, but actually praised the initial intelligence assessment’s “analytical rigor.”
Mike Waltz, Trump’s nominee for United Nations ambassador and his former national security adviser, has also issued strong statements on the topic.
He at one point even warned that people were conflating Trump’s claims of “no collusion” with the idea that Russia didn’t interfere at all.
“We do have to draw a bright line between ‘no collusion’ … versus the Russians attacking our constitutional system and attacking our electoral system, which they absolutely are doing,” Waltz, then a Florida congressman, told CNN’s Jake Tapper in 2019.
He added: “We have to stay focused on that, because that is our democracy under attack.”
Today, Trump’s administration is yet again seeking to blur those lines. The conflations are continuing. And these officials will apparently just keep doing it — no matter what they said before.
