Tulsi Gabbard is setting Trump's base up for the next Epstein disappointment
Nothing Gabbard has released proves that assertion, including the 2017 House Intelligence Committee report questioning the intelligence community assessment that Russia wanted Trump to win the 2016 election.
That 2017 conclusion is at odds with the unanimous and bipartisan findings of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence that found Russia did in fact try to influence the campaign in Trump's favor but those efforts did not affect the outcome.
Gabbard's claims reinforce a long-standing narrative prevalent among MAGA supporters that Democrats sought to destroy Trump's candidacy, and then undermine his presidency, by manipulating information about Russian interference in the 2016 election.
Gabbard's unsubstantiated conclusions will come back to bite the Trump administration the same way Attorney General Pam Bondi's inability to release the Epstein client list has upset the president's supporters.
Unless the Trump administration is prepared to fabricate evidence, it's unlikely enough new information will ever be discovered to prove a conspiracy of the magnitude suggested by Gabbard.
MAGA supporters will be waiting for the mass arrest and imprisonment of Obama administration officials that never comes. Gabbard, and ultimately Trump, will be left to weakly explain why the conspirators aren't coming to justice.
Gabbard's powerful assertions came at a delicate moment for a Trump administration already caught in the middle of a similar storm of their own making about Epstein.
From the start, the investigations and public communications about Russian interference in the 2016 election were mishandled. It's important to acknowledge that fact upfront.
President Obama didn't have to release the government's conclusions about Russian interference a month before the 2016 election, conclusions that lent an air of legitimacy to accusations against Trump being discussed publicly by supporters of Hillary Clinton.
The FBI's probe into alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia was itself predicated on flimsy information. Even if Gabbard's wild assertions aren't true, and there's no evidence so far to suggest they are, the judgement exercised by parts of the government during and after the 2016 campaign still left a lot to be desired.
The Trump campaign had been the primary victim of the government's poor judgement, but former FBI Director James Comey evened the score a bit when he announced the opening of an FBI probe into Clinton's use of an unclassified email server days before the 2016 election.
Democrats botched the messaging around Russia's interference with the 2016 election, either accidentally or intentionally inflating its role and falsely insinuating the Trump campaign had been involved. But Gabbard is now recreating their mistakes with her reckless accusations.
Now that both sides have weaponized intelligence for political purposes, what matters is to restore trust in the intelligence community. Gabbard would say she's doing that by leveling her accusations in the name of transparency, but her aggressive assertions go beyond where the facts are leading and perpetuate an overblown narrative of government conspiracy.
Already, Democrats aren't inclined to believe what she's saying, just as most Republicans never bought into the Steele dossier or the assertions about Trump's collusion with Russia.
Beyond the trust gap with Democrats, Gabbard is setting the conditions for a major falling out with the MAGA faithful. After Epstein, this will be the second time that Trump administration officials allege a massive conspiracy but aren't able to produce evidence to support their claims.
Trump's core supporters believe these conspiracies are real because their leaders, officials like Bondi and Gabbard, keep telling them that proof exists. They'll demand action over Gabbard's accusations, the way they are with Epstein, then be left with no choice but to assume the Trump administration is complicit in the coverup when no action comes.
This is a distraction Trump doesn't need. He would do well to direct Gabbard to tone down her assertions rather than egg her on.
Going forward, the intelligence community, elected officials, the Justice Department and the government in general should take a lesson from former President Gerald Ford. Ford understood that prosecuting President Richard Nixon would divide the country and create more problems than it solved. He made the hard decision to allow what was probably criminal conduct to go unpunished to allow the nation to heal.
Except in cases of the most egregious crimes supported by the strongest evidence, the U.S. government should take a break from seeking to prosecute former government officials.
Democrats spent years rooting for Trump to go to jail or actively trying to put Trump in jail for perceived crimes. Gabbard seems intent on doing the same in reverse.
This is a bad place for the country to be, with the intelligence community being used against former officials and sensitive information being declassified when it suits a political purpose. This type of behavior will have a chilling effect on everything the intelligence community does and further divide our country.
The Trump administration should be the grown-up in the room and break this dangerous cycle now.
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Hickey, who oversaw counterintelligence, espionage, and foreign computer hacking cases, had no involvement with the Epstein and Maxwell prosecutions. But he and other national security law experts told Business Insider it's notable that neither Epstein nor Maxwell raised intelligence connections in their defense. "You would expect him to want to prove that what he was doing was because the government sent him out to do it," Hickey says. "That would be fodder for a defense." The Trump administration's recent backpedaling on a promise to release more documents from the Justice Department's Epstein files has reignited long-standing suspicions that the government is hiding details of Epstein's crimes and protecting his many powerful and influential associates. FBI Director Kash Patel and his deputy, Dan Bongino, pushed for the release of the "Epstein files" before joining the administration, claiming the government was participating in a cover-up. The idea that Epstein had some kind of intelligence role has been promoted by Steve Bannon, who recorded hours of interviews with Epstein in the months before his death. Do you have any information about the Justice Department's Epstein files? Contact Business Insider Legal Correspondent Jacob Shamsian at jshamsian@ or on the secure messaging app Signal at JacobShamsian.07. . In February, Attorney General Pam Bondi published several hundred pages of documents from the Justice Department's trove, which she described as "Phase One" of the release. All but three pages had been made public years earlier. In some documents, the Justice Department bizarrely added new redactions to already-public records. (The Justice Department has denied Business Insider's FOIA requests for many of the files; the denials are being appealed. Justice Department representatives didn't respond to requests for comment.) This month, the Justice Department released a two-page memo announcing that "no further disclosure would be appropriate or warranted." Elon Musk, who left his government role in June in an ugly split with Trump, has led calls for the full release of the Epstein files, saying on X that doing so would be a priority for his new political party. MAGA-friendly pundits, including former Fox News host Tucker Carlson have pushed the theory — based on connect-the-dots leaps of logic — that Epstein was working for the Mossad. Earlier this month, The Wall Street Journal reported that Bondi informed President Donald Trump in the spring that his name appeared in the Epstein files, though it's not clear in what context. Trump and Epstein were friendly in the 1990s, before Epstein registered as a sex offender. On Thursday and Friday, Justice Department officials met with Maxwell near the Florida prison where she's serving a 20-year sentence. Theories about Epstein are rooted in mistrust: Epstein's life and death represent failures of the institutions that were supposed to bring him to justice. The conspiracy theories around intelligence make hay of his connections without offering much evidence beyond them. They note, for instance, that Ghislaine Maxwell's father, the late British business tycoon Robert Maxwell, is widely believed to have worked for Israeli intelligence. Barak visited Epstein's Manhattan townhouse on multiple occasions after Barak left office — something the former prime minister later said he regretted — and Epstein was an investor in one of Barak's companies. Burns also met multiple times with Epstein while he was deputy Secretary of State, but before he led the CIA. A CIA spokesperson said the meetings were arranged so that Epstein could offer Burns career advice. If he had had any connection to any governmental agency whatsoever, I would be the first person to know about it. Alan Dershowitz, former Epstein defense attorney Two specific claims that are often cited to make the case that Epstein was an intelligence asset have been contradicted. The first comes from a 2019 opinion column in the Daily Beast written by journalist Vicky Ward. According to Ward, Alex Acosta, the Florida prosecutor who gave Epstein a sweetheart deal in the mid-2000s that allowed him to serve a light jail sentence despite law enforcement's belief that he had abused dozens of girls, was asked about the case during his vetting to be named labor secretary during the first Trump administration. "I was told Epstein 'belonged to intelligence' and to leave it alone," Acosta said, according to Ward's anonymous source. Acosta said the opposite when he spoke to the Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility for a report published in 2020. Asked whether he had knowledge of Epstein being "an intelligence asset," Acosta told them, "the answer is no." Acosta's response was buried in a footnote on page 169 of the 348-page report and was not widely seen. Acosta declined to comment for this story. "I was told what I was told and the person who's told it to me has never backtracked from it," Ward told Business Insider. Alan Dershowitz, who represented Epstein in the Florida case, told Business Insider that Epstein told him he didn't have ties to intelligence agencies. "He said 'absolutely no.' He said he wished he did, that it would've been very helpful" to get an even better deal, Dershowitz says. "If he had had any connection to any governmental agency whatsoever, I would be the first person to know about it." One of Epstein's accusers, Virginia Giuffre, accused Dershowitz of abuse, but later withdrew the allegation and said she "may have made a mistake." Dershowitz has called for the public release of the Epstein files. "They would distinguish between true accusations and false accusations," he said. The second claim involves the existence of videos — filmed for the benefit of Epstein's intelligence handlers, the theory goes — showing Epstein's friends having sex with underage girls. Epstein's victims have said he told them he had cameras throughout his homes. The specific claim that Epstein was recording sexual acts involving his associates comes from statements that Sarah Ransome, one of Epstein's accusers, made in 2016. Ransome later admitted that she made it up. "I was absolutely terrified that, once I went public with my story, Jeffrey and Ghislaine would find and kill me," Ransome wrote in her 2021 memoir. If the seized Epstein documents contained any whiff of intelligence ties, there are several ways that could have shown up. Typically, when Justice Department prosecutors suspect a US intelligence agency, such as the CIA or NSA, might have information pertinent to a criminal case they're investigating, they will make a request for a prudential review, also called a prudential search, experts in national security law said. "Epstein had one condition: he wanted assurances that the SDNY did not see him as a rapist. That was the end of that. He was a rapist, and we were not about to give him some other, more polite-sounding label." Geoffrey Berman, former US attorney "The prudential review is where you kick the tires and make sure there's nothing that the intelligence community has that is going to make it impossible or unethical for you to bring your case because you can't comply with your discovery obligations because the information is classified," says Hickey, who's now a defense attorney with the firm Mayer Brown. There's no indication that a prudential review ever took place, according to the four people who had access to the records seized by the FBI. In Epstein's case, the reason for this might have come down to timing, two of his lawyers told BI: His death, mere weeks after his arrest, meant there wasn't much time to process the evidence against him. "Because Epstein died very early on, the government had produced little discovery and our primary initial focus was bail," one of those lawyers in the 2019 case, Marc Fernich, told Business Insider. In his memoir, Geoffrey Berman, the US attorney who oversaw the case against Epstein, wrote that his team never met with Epstein's defense team to discuss the possibility of a plea deal. "Epstein had one condition: he wanted assurances that the SDNY did not see him as a rapist," Berman wrote. "That was the end of that. He was a rapist, and we were not about to give him some other, more polite-sounding label." There's also no indication that a prudential review was requested in the case against Maxwell, which involved much of the same evidence collected for Epstein's prosecution, the four people said. A representative for the US Attorney's office in the Southern District of New York and an attorney for Maxwell declined to comment. In addition, there's no record of evidence being removed for national security reasons. For prosecutors to remove certain pieces of evidence, to avoid exposing sensitive intelligence to defense attorneys, they would need to file motions under the Classified Information Procedures Act, or CIPA. The motions would be noted on the public court docket, experts said. "The way things normally happen is that there would be some tell in the docket that you're dealing with these issues, and the court knows about it through CIPA," says Hickey. CIPA was enacted in 1980 to make it easier to prosecute people with intelligence ties. Until then, legal experts say, defendants with such ties could use the threat of exposing government secrets — "graymail," as it was called — to avoid prosecution. "Before CIPA, basically nobody would ever prosecute CIA officers because they would always pull this shit," says Kel McClanahan, a national security attorney and law professor at George Washington University. BI's search of the docket for the federal cases against Epstein or Maxwell found no mention of CIPA litigation. No member of Maxwell's high-powered defense team — which included lawyers who have worked on cases involving terrorists and international drug traffickers — asked the judge to order prosecutors to conduct a prudential search of intelligence agency material. If it's true that there was never a search for government secrets or arguments for pulling evidence, and if no links to intelligence ever emerged from extensive reviews of the Epstein files, it does not "definitively remove the question" of an intelligence role, McClanahan says. But it's a "pretty damn convincing" sign, he says. Jacob Shamsian is a correspondent on Business Insider's Legal Affairs desk. Business Insider's Discourse stories provide perspectives on the day's most pressing issues, informed by analysis, reporting, and expertise.
