Gabbard's claims of anti-Trump conspiracy not supported by declassified documents
As evidence, Ms. Gabbard cited newly declassified emails from Obama officials and a five-year-old classified House report in hopes of undermining the intelligence community's conclusion that Russian President Vladimir Putin wanted to boost Mr. Trump and denigrate his Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton.
Russia's activities during the 2016 election remain some of the most examined events in recent history. The Kremlin's campaign and the subsequent US government response were the subject of at least five major investigations by the Republican-led House and Senate intelligence committee; two Justice Department special counsels; and the department's inspector general.
Also Read | Republican-led probe finds Russia helped Trump in 2016 election
Those investigations either concluded — or accepted the conclusion — that Russia embarked on a campaign to interfere in the election through the use of social media and hacked material.
The House-led probe, conducted by Mr. Trump's allies, also concurred that Russia ran an election interference campaign but said the purpose was to sow chaos in the US rather than boost Trump. Several of the reports criticise the actions of Obama administration officials, particularly at the FBI, but do not dispute the fundamental findings that Moscow sought to interfere in the election.
The Associated Press has reviewed those reports to evaluate how Ms. Gabbard's claims stack up:
Russian election interference
CLAIM: 'The intelligence community had one assessment: that Russia did not have the intent and capability to try to impact the outcome of the US election leading up to Election Day. The same assessment was made after the election.' — Gabbard to Fox News on Tuesday.
The documents Gabbard released do not support her claim. She cites a handful of emails from 2016 in which officials conclude that Russia had no intention of manipulating the U.S. vote count through cyberattacks on voting systems.
President Barack Obama's administration never alleged that the voting infrastructure was tampered with. Rather, the administration said Russia ran a covert influence campaign using hacked and stolen material from prominent Democrats.
Russian operatives then used that information as part of state-funded media and social media operations to inflame US public opinion. More than two dozen Russians were indicted in 2018 in connection with those efforts.
Republican-led investigations in Congress have affirmed that conclusion, and the emails that Gabbard released do not contradict that finding.
Shift in assessment?
CLAIM: 'There was a shift, a 180-degree shift, from the intelligence community's assessment leading up to the election to the one that President Obama directed be produced after Donald Trump won the election that completely contradicted those assessments that had come previously.' — Ms. Gabbard to Fox News on Tuesday.
There was no shift. The emails Ms. Gabbard released show that a Department of Homeland Security official in August 2016 told then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper there was 'no indication of a Russian threat to directly manipulate the actual vote count.'
The public assessment the Obama administration made public in January 2017 reached the same conclusion: 'DHS assesses that the types of systems Russian actors targeted or compromised were not involved in vote tallying."
Putin's intent
CLAIM: The Obama administration "manufactured the January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment that they knew was false, promoting the LIE that Vladimir Putin and the Russian government helped President Trump win the 2016 election.' — Gabbard on Truth Social Wednesday.
The material declassified this week reveals some dissent within the intelligence community about whether Putin wanted to help Trump or simply inflame the U.S. public. That same question led to a partisan divide on the House Intelligence panel when it examined the matter several years later.
Ms. Gabbard's memo, released last week, cites a 'whistleblower' who she says served in the intelligence community at the time and who is quoted as saying that he could not 'concur in good conscience' with the intelligence community's judgment that Russia had a 'decisive preference' for Trump.
Such dissent and debate are not unusual in the drafting of intelligence reports. The Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee examined whether there was any political interference in the Obama administration's conclusions and reported that 'all analysts expressed that they were free to debate, object to content, and assess confidence levels, as is normal and proper.'
In 2018, Putin directly addressed the question of whether he preferred Trump at a press conference in Helsinki even as he sidestepped a question about whether he directed any of his subordinates to help Trump.
'Yes, I did,' Mr. Putin said. 'Because he talked about bringing the US-Russia relationship back to normal.'
Steele dossier
CLAIM: 'They used already discredited information like the Steele dossier — they knew it was discredited at the time.' — Gabbard to Fox News on Tuesday.
The dossier refers to a collection of opposition research files compiled by a former British spy, Christopher Steele, whose work was funded by Democrats during the 2016 election.
Those files included uncorroborated tips and salacious gossip about Trump's ties to Russia, but the importance to the Russia investigation has sometimes been overstated.
It was not the basis for the FBI's decision to open an investigation in July 2016 into potential coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia, the Justice Department's inspector general found.
Some of the records released by Gabbard this week also reveal that it was a Central Intelligence Agency human source close to the Kremlin that the agency primarily relied on for its conclusion that Putin wanted to help Trump and hurt Clinton, not the Steele dossier.
FBI agents on the case didn't even come to possess the dossier until weeks into their inquiry. Even so, Trump supporters have seized on the unverified innuendo in the document to undercut the broader Russia investigation. Many of Steele's claims have since been discredited or denied.
It is true, however, that the FBI and Justice Department relied in part on the Steele dossier to obtain surveillance warrants to eavesdrop on the communications of a former Trump campaign adviser, the inspector general found. FBI agents continued to pursue those warrants even after questions arose about the credibility of Steele's reporting.
The dossier was also summarised — over the objections of then-CIA Director John Brennan, he has said — in a two-page annex to the classified version of the intelligence community assessment.
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President Donald Trump and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen have announced a sweeping trade deal that imposes 15 per cent tariffs on most European goods, warding off Trump's threat of a 30 per cent rate if no deal had been reached by August 1. The tariffs, or import taxes, paid when Americans buy European products could raise prices for US consumers and dent profits for European companies and their partners who bring goods into the country. Here are some things to know about the trade deal between the United States and the European Union: What's in the agreement? Trump and von der Leyen's announcement, made during Trump's visit to one of his golf courses in Scotland, leaves many details to be filled in. The headline figure is a 15 per cent tariff rate on the vast majority of European goods brought into the US, including cars, computer chips and pharmaceuticals. It's lower than the 20 per cent Trump initially proposed, and lower than his threats of 50 per cent and then 30 per cent. Von der Leyen said the two sides agreed on zero tariffs on both sides for a range of strategic goods: Aircraft and aircraft parts, certain chemicals, semiconductor equipment, certain agricultural products, and some natural resources and critical raw materials. Specifics were lacking. She said the two sides would keep working to add more products to the list. Additionally, the EU side would purchase what Trump said was USD 750 billion worth of natural gas, oil and nuclear fuel to replace Russian energy supplies, and Europeans would invest an additional USD 600 billion in the US. What's not in the deal? Trump said the 50 per cent US tariff on imported steel would remain; von der Leyen said the two sides agreed to further negotiations to fight a global steel glut, reduce tariffs and establish import quotas that is, set amounts that can be imported, often at a lower rate. Trump said pharmaceuticals were not included in the deal. Von der Leyen said the pharmaceuticals issue was on a separate sheet of paper from Sunday's deal. Where the $600 billion for additional investment would come from was not specified. And von der Leyen said that when it came to farm products, the EU side made clear that there were tariffs that could not be lowered, without specifying which products. What's the impact? The 15 per cent rate removes Trump's threat of a 30 per cent tariff. It's still much higher than the average tariff before Trump came into office of around 1 per cent, and higher than Trump's minimum 10 per cent baseline tariff. Higher tariffs, or import taxes, on European goods mean sellers in the US would have to either increase prices for consumers risking loss of market share or swallow the added cost in terms of lower profits. The higher tariffs are expected to hurt export earnings for European firms and slow the economy. The 10 per cent baseline applied while the deal was negotiated was already sufficiently high to make the European Union's executive commission cut its growth forecast for this year from 1.3 per cent to 0.9 per cent. Von der Leyen said the 15 per cent rate was the best we could do and credited the deal with maintaining access to the US market and providing stability and predictability for companies on both sides. What is some of the reaction to the deal? 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Asked if European carmakers could still sell cars at 15 per cent, von der Leyen said the rate was much lower than the current 27.5 per cent. That has been the rate under Trump's 25 per cent tariff on cars from all countries, plus the preexisting US car tariff of 2.5 per cent. The impact is likely to be substantial on some companies, given that automaker Volkswagen said it suffered a $1.5 billion hit to profit in the first half of the year from the higher tariffs. Mercedes-Benz dealers in the US have said they are holding the line on 2025 model year prices until further notice. The German automaker has a partial tariff shield because it makes 35 per cent of the Mercedes-Benz vehicles sold in the US in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, but the company said it expects prices to undergo significant increases in coming years. What were the issues dividing the two sides? Before Trump returned to office, the US and the EU maintained generally low tariff levels in what is the largest bilateral trading relationship in the world, with some USD 2 trillion in annual trade. Together the US and the EU have 44 per cent of the global economy. The US rate averaged 1.47 per cent for European goods, while the EU's averaged 1.35 per cent for American products, according to the Bruegel think tank in Brussels. Trump has complained about the EU's 198 billion-euro trade surplus in goods, which shows Americans buy more from European businesses than the other way around, and has said the European market is not open enough for US-made cars. However, American companies fill some of the trade gap by outselling the EU when it comes to services such as cloud computing, travel bookings, and legal and financial services. And some 30 per cent of European imports are from American-owned companies, according to the European Central Bank. (Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
