By Zachary Stieber
Contributing Writer
Former President Barack Obama is maintaining that Russia attempted to interfere with the 2016 presidential election, after intelligence officials declassified documents that shed light on actions by top administration officials at the time.
“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 for Obama told news outlets on Tuesday.
Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard last week released declassified documents that she said showed “President Obama and his national security cabinet members manufactured and politicized intelligence to lay the groundwork for what was essentially a years-long coup against President Trump.”
Obama’s spokesperson also cited a 2020 Senate Intelligence Committee report, saying the committee affirmed that Russia worked to influence the election.
The Senate report referenced by Obama said that Russia “engaged in an aggressive, multi-faceted effort to influence, or attempt to influence, the outcome of the 2016 presidential election.”
In response to the statement, Gabbard accused the former president of practicing “the art of deflection.”
The statement “does not actually address the issue that was revealed in great detail in the over 100 documents that we released last week, and the documents that we will be releasing later this week,” Gabbard said in a Fox News interview on Tuesday.
President Donald Trump, when asked about Gabbard’s criminal referrals to the Department of Justice based on information in the declassified documents, said at the White House on Tuesday that Obama is guilty of treason.
“It’s Obama. His orders are on the paper. The papers are signed. The papers came right out of their office,” Trump said, referring to the finding by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence that Obama had requested a new intelligence assessment into Russia’s alleged interference in the election after intelligence agencies had previously found Russia did not use cyberattacks to target the election.
Trump said that “they tried to rig the election, and they got caught, and there should be very severe consequences for that.”
Newly Released Documents
The documents declassified by Gabbard on Friday included an intelligence community assessment from before the November 2016 election that Russia was probably not trying to influence the election “by using cyber means.”
Another document, a set of talking points prepared in December 2016 for the then-director of national intelligence, stated that “foreign adversaries did not use cyberattacks on election infrastructure to alter the U.S. presidential election outcome.”
Two days later, Obama met with top officials to discuss Russia and, according to an email from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence that Gabbard declassified, requested that officials create a new intelligence community assessment that went over “tools Moscow used and actions it took to influence the 2016 election.”
That new assessment was released in January 2017. It stated that Russia used cyber efforts and other tools to try to help then-President-elect Donald Trump win the election while undermining former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, his opponent.
“After months of investigation into this matter, the facts reveal this new assessment was based on information that was known by those involved to be manufactured i.e. the Steele Dossier, or deemed as not credible,” Gabbard’s office said on Friday as it released the documents, referring to a dossier compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele with money from Clinton’s campaign that put forth a number of unsubstantiated allegations about Trump and Russia.
Gabbard, in her statement, also noted that the assessment resulted in the years-long investigation into Trump and Russia by former special counsel Robert Mueller, as well as “high-level officials being investigated, arrested, and thrown in jail, heightened U.S.-Russia tensions, and more.”
The former member of Congress described the efforts as “a treasonous conspiracy in 2016 committed by officials at the highest level of our government.”
She added, “Their goal was to subvert the will of the American people and enact what was essentially a years-long coup with the objective of trying to usurp the president from fulfilling the mandate bestowed upon him by the American people.”
