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Reports in 2016 that Russian President Vladimir Putin backed Donald Trump in that year’s presidential election were bogus, according to documents released Wednesday by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard.
Gabbard told Newsmax on Tuesday that more documents directly refuting a statement issued earlier in the day by former President Barack Obama’s camp denying his role in an alleged coup attempt against Trump would be released.
The latest documents — a declassified report prepared by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence back in 2020 — show Putin believed then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton would win the 2016 presidential election. The Russian president’s team launched cyberattacks and leaked emails that focused on weakening Clinton’s future administration.
Putin even “held back leaking some compromising material to use against the expected Clinton administration after they took office,” the documents show.
The claim that Putin preferred Trump and tried to help him win did not meet professional Intelligence Community standards, according to the documents. The claim was based on “one scant, unclear, and unverifiable fragment of a sentence” from a flawed report.
That single line became the only classified evidence cited to support the Trump-preference claim.
“The ICA [Intelligence Community Assessment] misrepresented these reports as reliable, without mentioning their significant underlying flaws,” said the report, adding the CIA also ignored or selectively quoted better-quality intelligence that contradicted that claim.
Gabbard is expected to attend a Wednesday afternoon White House press briefing.
The DNI director joined “Rob Schmitt Tonight” on Tuesday, days after first announcing that she had provided the Department of Justice with “overwhelming evidence” that Obama and his national security team laid the groundwork for a “yearslong” Russia-connected “coup” against Trump.
The smoking gun, Gabbard argues, was a Dec. 9, 2016, meeting at the White House with several top National Security Council principals, the result of which created a new assessment “per the President’s request” to detail “the tools Moscow used and actions it took to influence the 2016 election.”
That assessment, in which then-CIA Director John Brennan pushed for the inclusion of the since-discredited Steele dossier, was examined to discover whether it followed professional standards. Investigators spent more than 2,300 hours reviewing intelligence reports and interviewed 20 CIA and FBI officials.
The review was based on Intelligence Community Directive 203, the rulebook for sound analytic tradecraft.
The latest released documents show the CIA’s work was rushed, with five analysts being hand-picked. The report was published just two weeks before Trump took office, leaving little time for review or corrections.
The review offered three recommendations: Improve peer review. Require political appointees to step aside during transitions. And clearly flag low-confidence intelligence when cited in finished assessments.
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