Shoddy evidence feeds Trump's phony 'Russiagate' narrative
Special counsel Robert Mueller’s report concluded that the goal of Russia’s 2016 election meddling was to harm Clinton and help Trump. Credit: AP/Susan Walsh
The "Russiagate" scandal, which dogged Donald Trump at the start of his first presidential term with accusations that Vladimir Putin helped him get elected, is back, this time, with the tables turned. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has made dramatic accusations, allegedly backed up by newly declassified documents, that the scandal was deliberately concocted by President Barack Obama and his intelligence chiefs in late 2016 as a way to "get" the incoming President Trump.
Trump has openly accused Obama of "treason."
Trump supporters — and other critics of the Trump/Russia investigation, including leftists hostile to the national security apparatus — are celebrating their vindication. But others, including those highly critical of the 2016-17 investigation, are cautioning that the documents do not support the shocking allegations and that Gabbard is doing the very thing she is accusing Obama administration officials of doing: weaponizing intelligence for a partisan purpose.
Gabbard’s initial memo on the "Russia hoax," released last week, claims that while intelligence assessments before and immediately after the 2016 election concluded that Russian cyberattacks did not tamper with the vote in the presidential election, Obama pushed for a new assessment which yielded the opposite conclusion — in disregard of key facts. Even Russiagate critics such as journalist Eli Lake have pointed out that Gabbard’s claim rests on sleight of hand.
The Obama administration never alleged vote-tampering in the sense of altering votes or vote-counting by means of hacking. The accusations of Russian "meddling" via hacking operations referred to the leaking of stolen emails from the Democratic National Committee and from Hillary Clinton’s campaign. These documents were tendentiously spun to boost false claims that undermined Clinton — in particular, that the Democratic primaries were "fixed" to favor her and cheat Bernie Sanders.
Gabbard’s own memo grudgingly concedes that there is evidence this hacking and leaking took place. Moreover, not only the 2018 report by special counsel Robert Mueller but the 2020 bipartisan report by the Senate Intelligence Committee concluded that the goal of Russian interference in the 2016 election was to damage Clinton and help Trump. Both probes also found that, while there was no evidence the Trump campaign conspired in the Russian operation, it readily took advantage of the supposed "dirt" on Clinton obtained through this operation — and key campaign figures made efforts to find out what "dirt" was in the stolen documents before they were leaked.
This week, Gabbard declassified a 2020 House Intelligence Committee report which questions the conclusion that the purpose of Russian meddling was to hurt Clinton’s chances or help Trump. But that report was a partisan GOP effort that hyped unverified claims from Russian sources — for instance, that Russian intelligence supposedly had highly damaging information on Clinton’s health and emotional problems, which the Kremlin chose not to disclose before the election.
The Trump administration is using shoddy evidence to promote Trump’s phony narrative painting him as a victim of a "hoax" while denying obvious facts. Incredibly, press secretary Karoline Leavitt now attacks the media for claiming that "the president's son was holding secret meetings with the Russians" — even though such a meeting, in the hope of obtaining compromising information on Clinton, was admitted by both Donald Trump Jr. and his father.
The goal is both to settle scores with Trump’s past enemies and to distract from current bad publicity. If there’s a "Russia hoax" for nefarious political purposes, the Trump administration is the one trying to pull it off.
Opinions expressed by Cathy Young, a writer for The Bulwark, are her own.