Tulsi Gabbard became a ‘weapon of mass distraction’

Josh Marcus, The Independent

Critics have accused Tulsi Gabbard of trying to shield Donald Trump's administration from scrutiny through her recent claims that top Obama administration officials should be prosecuted for leading a "coup" against the president in 2016 by investigating Russian efforts to help his campaign. The allegations and conspiracy theories "would be sad if they weren't so dangerous," Democratic Rep. Jason Crow told Fox News on Sunday. "She has turned herself into a weapon of mass distraction, is what I've been calling it." Crow accused Trump's national intelligence director of "trying to curry and get back into favor with Donald Trump and has concocted these theories to do so," an apparent reference to Gabbard and Trump's public disagreement over the state of Iran's nuclear programme.

This month, Gabbard spearheaded the release of materials regarding the then-outgoing Obama administration's attempts to probe Russian influence operations during the 2016 election. Critics saw the release as an attempt to distract from continued criticism of the Trump administration for its handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files and the president's ties to the late financier, who died in prison while awaiting a federal sex trafficking trial. "Nothing in this partisan, previously scuttled document changes that," Senator Mark Warner, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, told The Hill after the disclosures.

"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 politicise the very intelligence she has been entrusted to protect," he said. Gabbard claims the Obama materials, including a declassified 2020 Republican report from the House intelligence committee, reveal his "years long coup" against Trump. She claims that top Obama officials pushed to override past intelligence findings to allege that Russians specifically wanted to boost the Trump campaign, rather than undermine faith in the US election system more generally, and has called for Obama and others to face criminal charges. Trump has echoed such claims, sharing a fake, AI- generated video of Obama being arrested and thrown in jail on his Truth Social account.

As evidence of the alleged coup, Gabbard honed in on past conclusions that Russian actors did not successfully hack digital voting infrastructure or change vote counts, suggesting these findings clashed with intelligence officials' later assessments that Russia sought to help Trump. Susan Miller, a former CIA officer who helped oversee the 2017 intelligence assessment, said Gabbard was "lying." "We definitely had the intel to show with high probability that the specific goal of the Russians was to get Trump elected," Miller told NBC News, adding that intelligence officials had briefed Trump on their findings and he had thanked them. "At the same time, we found no two-way collusion between Trump or his team with the Russians at that time," she said.

Obama's office issued a rare public statement denouncing Gabbard's allegations. "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," a spokesperson said. The White House has pushed back against the argument that Gabbard's investigation is a partisan play. "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," White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said during a Wednesday briefing. "And it's not working," she said.

Multiple assessments have backed up the intelligence community's original findings of a general, one-way Russian influence operation that sought to boost Trump through tactics like hacking Democratic party materials and spreading disinformation online, even though the Trump campaign itself wasn't shown to have collaborated on the effort. Special counsels have investigated both the underlying "Russiagate" claims and the origins of the FBI investigation into the Trump campaign without uncovering any intentional "coup" by the Obama administration.