Gabbard and White House 'lying' about intel on Russian interference in 2016, ex-CIA official says

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3 days ago

The former senior CIA officer who helped oversee the 2017 intelligence assessment on Russia's interference in the 2016 election says Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and the White House are 'lying' when they claim that it was an attempt to sabotage President Donald Trump.
Susan Miller, a retired CIA officer who helped lead the team that produced the report about Russia's actions during the 2016 campaign, told NBC News it was based on credible information that showed Moscow sought to help Trump win the election, but that there was no sign of a conspiracy between the Kremlin and the Trump campaign.
'The director of national intelligence and the White House are lying, again,' Miller said. 'We definitely had the intel to show with high probability that the specific goal of the Russians was to get Trump elected.'
She added: 'At the same time, we found no two-way collusion between Trump or his team with the Russians at that time.'
Miller spoke to NBC News after Gabbard alleged Wednesday that the 2017 intelligence assessment was based on 'manufactured' information as part of a 'treasonous conspiracy' by the Obama administration to undermine Trump and tarnish his electoral victory. Gabbard cited a 2020 report from Republicans on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, which she declassified and released this week, that asserted there was insufficient information to conclude Russia had been trying to tip the scales in favor of Trump.
Miller said 'it is clear that Trump and his followers have a script they want to follow, despite the facts.'
She said that when her team briefed Trump and others about their assessment in 2017, they made clear there was no way to gauge the impact of the Russian information warfare on the vote, and that Trump was the country's lawful commander in chief.
'Both me and my team readily acknowledged — to Trump and others in the USG [U.S. government] we briefed — that we could not say if this attempt by the Russians actually worked unless someone polled every single Trump voter to see if this disinformation was what led them to vote for Trump,' she said.
'Both my team and I and DCIA [the director of the CIA] said clearly in our report to Trump himself and to the intel committees [in Congress] that Trump was our president,' Miller said.
Trump thanked the CIA director for the briefing, Miller said.
'That part was left out by Gabbard,' Miller said.
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence dismissed Miller's comments.
'Susan is wrong. And the American people can read for themselves hundreds of reasons why she is wrong in the declassified HPSCI report,' said ODNI spokesperson Olivia Coleman, referring to the 2020 Republican House intelligence report.
The Republican House report was emphatically rejected at the time by Democratic lawmakers on the panel. But a bipartisan Senate probe released the same year endorsed the intelligence agencies' assessment that Russia had spread disinformation and leaked stolen emails from the Democratic party to undermine Hillary Clinton's candidacy and bolster Trump's prospects. Trump's current secretary of state, Marco Rubio, was the acting chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee at the time and endorsed the conclusions of the panel's report.
When asked about Miller's defense of the intelligence assessment, White House spokesperson Davis Ingle said: 'Director Gabbard declassified documents in the name of transparency to show the world that the Obama administration was indeed behind the Russia, Russia, Russia hoax. Those who participated in criminal activity will be held accountable to the fullest extent of the law.'
The CIA declined to comment.
'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,' Patrick Rodenbush, a spokesman for former President Barack Obama, said in a statement this week. 'But these claims are outrageous enough to merit one. These bizarre allegations are ridiculous and a weak attempt at distraction.'
In advance of the 2016 election, intelligence reporting indicated Russia was trying to influence the election with disinformation, Miller said. After the vote, John Brennan — who was CIA director at the time and is now a paid NBC News and MSNBC contributor — asked her to put together a task force that would rigorously examine Russia's role in the election.
Miller, who served nine tours abroad with CIA during her 39-year career, was head of agency counterintelligence at the time. She said she put together a team with a range of skills and expertise, including analysts and officers working in counterintelligence.
As they began their work on the assessment, Miller said, she and the rest of her team were keenly aware of the polarized political climate in the country in the aftermath of the election. They were facing pressure from officials both inside and outside the CIA.
'There were people that hated Trump that wanted us to find that Trump was complicit. And there were those that loved Trump. They wanted us to find nothing. And we ignored all of it,' Miller said.
'We just kept ourselves neutral,' she added. 'We just decided to let the data speak for itself. ... We had very, very good data coming in.'
Brennan did not pressure or micromanage the task force, she said. Gabbard, current CIA Director John Ratcliffe and the White House have accused Brennan of fabricating intelligence about the 2016 election to undermine Trump. Brennan has rejected the allegations as 'baseless.'
The task force examined every possible angle, Miller said, including whether Trump and his campaign somehow conspired with the Kremlin to skew the election outcome. They did not find intelligence to support that scenario, she said.
After sifting through all the intelligence and publicly available information, the team concluded that Russia had waged a large-scale information warfare campaign to undermine America's democratic process, damage Hillary Clinton's candidacy and boost Trump's chances.
'The paper was multiple pages long, but the summary of it is 100% they tried to influence the election, and 100% we can't say if it worked unless we polled every voter,' Miller said.
When the assessment was wrapping up and a draft was being edited, then-FBI Director James Comey asked that the report include a dossier about Trump by a former British intelligence officer, Christopher Steele, according to Miller and a Senate report from 2020, which cited accounts from multiple officials, including Comey and Brennan. The dossier featured unverified allegations about Trump that had not been corroborated by U.S. intelligence agencies, and CIA officials argued against adding references to the dossier in the report.
'We had already written the paper and it was going through edits,' Miller said.
The FBI's stance annoyed Miller. Her view was that 'we can't just shove this in' to the assessment at such a late stage and that 'it's going to take us another six months to go and try to figure out if this is true,' she said.
But the FBI insisted that if the dossier were not included, the bureau would withdraw and not endorse the intelligence assessment, according to Miller. 'The FBI said that 'unless you tag it onto the end of it, then we're not going to sign off on this,'' she said.
In the end, the CIA and the FBI worked out a compromise. The dossier was included in an annex to the assessment, with a disclaimer that the claims in the file had not been verified by the intelligence community.
Comey could not be reached for comment.
Later on during the first Trump administration, Miller was called up to the general counsel's office at the CIA. There, she said, an agency lawyer told her she was facing possible criminal charges over her role leading the assessment.
Miller assumed it was a joke. 'I laughed out loud.' But it was not.
Miller decided to hire a lawyer, though it was unclear what potential criminal charge was in play. The administration eventually used a special counsel, John Durham, to investigate how the previous administration had handled probes into Russian election interference and the Trump campaign.
Durham's team questioned Miller for hours. They asked her questions about whether she had an anti-Republican bias that influenced how the assessment was written, Miller said.
'I was answering questions like, 'Tell us how you hate all Republicans, and that's why you wrote this paper.' Actually, if you look at my registration, I'm a Republican.'
Miller was never charged with any crime and she said she was never disciplined in any way over the intelligence assessment. She retired during the Biden administration after 39 years with the CIA.
Earlier this month, Ratcliffe declassified an internal 'lessons learned' review looking at how the intelligence assessment was drafted. The internal review found that some standard procedures were not followed and that the report was rushed, but did not question the conclusions of the assessment.
Miller said no one at the CIA contacted her for the internal review. The CIA declined to comment.
Nine years since the 2016 election, Russia is likely pleased to see yet more political acrimony in Washington over what transpired, according to Miller.
'Putin and his BFFs in the Kremlin are toasting vodka shots as we speak at the turmoil this is creating,' she said.
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com