Trump Administration Live Updates: Judge Denies Request to Unseal Epstein Grand Jury Transcripts in Florida

New York Times

4 days ago

Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, has contended that the intelligence work in 2016 was not only flawed but also amounted to a conspiracy against President Trump.
Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, released a document on Wednesday that she said undermined the conclusion of intelligence agencies during the Obama administration that Russia favored the election of Donald J. Trump in 2016.
The document was a report that the House Intelligence Committee originally drafted in 2017, when Republicans led the panel. The report took issue with the conclusion reached in December 2016 that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia had favored Mr. Trump.
The new material provides some interesting insights into the development of the review of Russian activity by American spy agencies, and the debate over their assessment. But none of the new information changes the fundamental view that Russia meddled in the election and that Mr. Putin hoped to damage Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee.
On Sunday, Ms. Gabbard promised to refer the details of her findings to the Justice Department. And on Wednesday, she said in a social media post that Mr. Trump had ordered the declassification of the report and that the information showed the 'most egregious weaponization and politicization of intelligence in American history.'
The Obama administration, Ms. Gabbard wrote, was 'promoting the LIE that Vladimir Putin and the Russian government helped President Trump win the 2016 election.'
Ms. Gabbard has won praise from Mr. Trump for her investigation into the intelligence findings and spoke at length about how the 2016 assessment was part of a witch hunt against him. The president has been under sharp criticism for his handling of documents related to the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein, and his attacks on the Obama administration appear to be part of a distract-and-deflect strategy.
Ms. Gabbard reiterated her assertion that the intelligence assessment was intended to undermine Mr. Trump's presidency.
'In doing so, they conspired to subvert the will of the American people,' she wrote, 'working with their partners in the media to promote the lie, in order to undermine the legitimacy of President Trump, essentially enacting a years-long coup against him.'
The report was released with relatively few redactions, prompting criticism from Democrats.
'Given the rushed and unusual 'declassification' process the D.N.I. has implemented, I fear that the public release of this report could compromise sensitive sources and methods and endanger our national security,' said Representative Jim Himes of Connecticut, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, referring to the director of national intelligence.
Officials familiar with the matter said that another, more heavily redacted version took care to hide more information about U.S. sources and had been considered for release. Ms. Gabbard said on social media that Mr. Trump had declassified the report.
Kash Patel, now Mr. Trump's F.B.I. director, was a key author of the report released on Wednesday, according to officials. Only Republicans on the committee participated in the drafting of the 2017 report and revisions in 2020.
The House report found that most of the judgments made by the intelligence community in 2016 were sound. But it argued that the work was rushed, as a recent tradecraft analysis by the C.I.A. also found. The assessment that Mr. Putin had favored Mr. Trump did not follow the 'professional criteria' of the other findings, the House report said.
The findings were at odds with a bipartisan series of Senate reports from a committee that included Marco Rubio, then a Republican senator from Florida and now Mr. Trump's secretary of state. The Senate Intelligence Committee affirmed the work of the C.I.A. and the other intelligence agencies on the 2016 assessment.
The judgment about Mr. Putin's preference, the House report said, was based on a single source who was biased against the Russian government. The raw intelligence was fragmentary and lacked context, the report added.
The detailed discussion of the source has not been made public before, although the U.S. decision to extract and relocate him, first to Virginia, has become public. Russia officials made the source's identity public and said he was an aide to a senior Russian official.
The 2017 report portrays the information as incomplete and subject to interpretation, pointing to a single piece of intelligence from the man that said Mr. Putin had decided to leak emails stolen from the Democratic National Committee because Mrs. Clinton had better odds of the election and Mr. Trump, 'whose victory Putin was counting, most likely would not be able to pull off a convincing victory.'
But current and former American officials pushed back on the characterization of the source's intelligence, saying he was well placed and had provided sound information to the United States on Mr. Putin's intentions.
While details about the debate over the source are new, the overall view of the House Intelligence Committee was well known, and members frequently took issue with the finding. But the full report with details of the C.I.A.'s work on the 2016 intelligence assessment has not been released.
Attacking the conclusions of the 2016 assessment that Russia sought to denigrate Mrs. Clinton and help Mr. Trump has been a hobby horse of some of the president's supporters. Republicans have long taken particular aim at the idea that the Kremlin favored Mr. Trump, arguing instead that Russia was simply trying to sow chaos or undermine democratic institutions.
The attacks on the documents have intensified in recent weeks as first the C.I.A. and then Ms. Gabbard's office have raised questions about the effort.
Bipartisan Senate reviews have validated the C.I.A.'s work in 2016, and John H. Durham, a special prosecutor appointed by Attorney General William P. Barr during Mr. Trump's first term, also failed to find any evidence undermining the intelligence agencies' conclusions.
While Mr. Trump's Republican supporters criticized the assessment during his first term, the president focused much of his ire on Robert S. Mueller III, the former F.B.I. director appointed to investigate any ties between the Trump campaign and Russian officials.
The newly released House document also takes a close look at the role that a dossier prepared by a former British intelligence officer, Christopher Steele, played in the 2016 assessment.
Trump administration officials have maintained that the 2016 intelligence review was tainted by unverified information in the so-called Steele dossier. A classified annex to the report mentioned the dossier, but former officials said the C.I.A. did not take it seriously and did not allow it to influence their assessment.
Few if any of the claims in Mr. Steele's work about Mr. Trump have been verified in the ensuing years.
In interviews this week, former officials insisted the Steele dossier did not influence the findings of the 2016 assessment. But the House report took issue with that, noting that in one of the bullet points in the original, classified version, the assessment referred readers to the annex discussing the dossier. The House report said the two-page annex summarizing the dossier 'misrepresented the significance and credibility' of Mr. Steele's work.
The dossier 'was written in an amateurish conspiracy and political propaganda tone that invited skepticism, if not ridicule, over its content,' the report continued.
The House review also said one C.I.A. officer said he confronted John O. Brennan, the agency's director at the time, with the flaws of the dossier. Mr. Brennan, according to the House report, acknowledged the flaws but added, 'doesn't it ring true.'
Mr. Brennan, who emerged as one of the sharpest critics of Mr. Trump, has long denied that the dossier colored the assessment and said that he backed C.I.A. officers who wanted it kept out of the main body. He has said he placed the dossier in the annex at the insistence of the F.B.I.
Former Obama administration officials acknowledged in hindsight that including the unverified dossier in the annex was a mistake, given the justifiable criticisms Republicans had of Mr. Steele's assertions. But the officials said the F.B.I. felt it had no choice but to include it in the annex to avoid appearing as if they were hiding something from Mr. Trump.
C.I.A. officials wanted to be sure the F.B.I. signed on to the overall assessments, and they felt that the bureau would do that only if the annex was included, former officials said.
The existence of the dossier was initially exposed by CNN, and then Buzzfeed published its contents.
Since Mr. Trump's return to office, the C.I.A. and Ms. Gabbard have tried to sow doubts about the assessment. Ms. Gabbard has contended that the intelligence work in 2016 was not just flawed but also amounted to a conspiracy against Mr. Trump.
On Friday, Ms. Gabbard issued a report that she said exposed a 'treasonous conspiracy,' claiming senior Obama administration officials had pressured the intelligence committee to change its views on Russian meddling. The documents presented showed that the Obama administration was eager to quickly complete its work but not that the intelligence agencies were altering their conclusions.
Mr. Trump has praised Ms. Gabbard, after criticizing her work just weeks earlier. Referring to Ms. Gabbard's report, Mr. Trump said on Tuesday that while in office, President Barack Obama 'was trying to lead a coup.'
Ms. Gabbard has said she wants to end the weaponization of intelligence. She has condemned politicians for what she sees as the use of selective bits of intelligence against their opponents.
While she has portrayed the release of the documents as a corrective to the errors and missteps of the Obama administration, former officials and even some allies of Ms. Gabbard have said her effort to throw a lifeline to Mr. Trump is an example of the very politicization she has vowed to stamp out.