DNI Tulsi Gabbard conflates ‘hack’ and ‘influence’ claims about 2016 election

Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Tulsi Gabbard, like much of official Washington, has recently focused on what she describes as a sordid and far-reaching scandal and cover-up reaching the highest levels. She has described how a cabal of some of the world’s most powerful engaged in a shocking criminal conspiracy and then deceived their fellow Americans in an effort to cover their tracks. 

No, she’s not talking about Jeffrey Epstein, the convicted sex offender whose connections to global elites have gripped much of the country six years after his death. Instead, Gabbard’s supposed bombshell centers on, of all things, the 2016 election. 

Hers is an effort to re-write history, overturning established facts with conspiratorial fiction, while also directing focus away from the current scandal engulfing her administration and, in particular, her boss and political benefactor, President Trump. It’s a history that I know well as a CIA officer who was serving in a senior role on President Obama’s National Security Council at the time. 

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First, some background. Gabbard took to social media late last week to tout the declassification of more than 100 pages of handpicked material from the latter half of 2016. She described its import in grandiose terms: “Americans will finally learn the truth about how in 2016, intelligence was politicized and weaponized by the most powerful people in the Obama Administration to lay the groundwork for what was essentially a years-long coup against President [Trump], subverting the will of the American people and undermining our democratic republic.” 

Gabbard contended that senior Obama officials buried and ultimately subverted the Intelligence Community’s finding that Russia did not “hack” the election. She then contrasted that assessment with the conclusion of the comprehensive report President Obama requested in December 2016. That document, released in an unclassified form the following month, found that Russia undertook an “influence campaign” to hinder the candidacy of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and aid that of then-candidate Trump. As Gabbard describes it, these alleged analytic discrepancies are reflective of a “treasonous conspiracy” by Obama officials to “subvert the will of the American people.”

Leaving aside the fact that President Obama immediately congratulated President Trump on his victory and welcomed him to the White House within 72 hours of Election Day, there’s only one problem with Gabbard’s sweeping claims: they’re entirely untrue. They’re not substantiated in the documents she released. Gabbard instead relies on a rhetorical sleight of hand to make her case, repeatedly—and presumably intentionally — conflating the terms “hack” and “influence.” 

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She is correct that before and after Election Day, the Intelligence Community assessed that Russia did not “hack” the election—that is, Moscow did not change votes or manipulate state voting systems to alter the outcome.The Obama administration nearly two months before the election issued a joint statement by the Department of Homeland Security and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence calling it “extremely difficult” to alter votes due to the decentralized nature of U.S. elections and built-in safeguards. Even Gabbard’s own memo makes clear that, when invoking Russia’s failure to “hack” the election, she is referencing that Moscow did not change votes, alter voter rolls, or otherwise disrupt the voting process through cyber or physical means. 

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Gabbard’s deceit, however, comes into view when she contrasts this judgment with the assessment of Moscow’s well-documented influence campaign. By leveraging social media bots, paid ads, and propaganda outlets, Moscow, according to the intelligence community, sought to denigrate Clinton’s campaign and bolster Trump’s. Gabbard calls this finding “false” and goes on to argue that previous analyses had “stated clearly that Russia ‘did not impact’ the election through cyber hacks on the election.” The willful distortion is obvious: attempts to “influence” voters through information operations and an effort to alter their votes through disruptive or destructive “hacking” are two very different things. 

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Further undermining Gabbard’s case is the fact that others with access to the same set of classified information came to the same conclusion as the January 2017 assessment. For example, the Senate Intelligence Committee on a bipartisan basis formally concluded during Trump’s first term that Russian agents undertook a broader effort to “influence the 2016 presidential election by harming Hillary Clinton’s chances of success and supporting Donald Trump at the direction of the Kremlin.” Among the Senators behind this report was the current Secretary of State Marco Rubio. 

Just ahead of the 2020 election, moreover, the Trump administration itself released a statement, apparently since purged from the DNI’s website, noting that Russia was seeking to undercut then-candidate Biden’s campaign against President Trump, while adding that some “Kremlin-linked actors” were attempting to boost Trump. In early 2021, the Intelligence Community released a formal assessment concluding that President Putin authorized influence operations to denigrate President Biden’s candidacy and support President Trump’s.

The ultimate irony is that Gabbard, who the White House months ago said was working with the Department of Justice to release additional Epstein files, is fabricating a scandal to divert attention from the real one swirling around her administration. It would be a cheap ploy if undertaken by just about any other U.S. official. Gabbard, however, is no ordinary functionary; she’s charged with safeguarding our national security and most sensitive information.

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As our adversaries, whether rogue states, terrorist groups, or cyber criminals, seek to do us harm, America’s most senior intelligence official is busying herself by fabricating partisan attacks against those the President deems his domestic political enemies. 

And therein lies another scandal.