As President Donald Trump tries to quiet a rebellion from his own base over his administration’s decision to withhold the release of the complete Jeffrey Epstein files, his director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, is going on offense.
Through memos and documents released both last week and this week, Gabbard is attempting to advance the evidence-free claim that officials in former President Barack Obama’s administration engaged in a “treasonous conspiracy” and “coup” attempt in 2016. Gabbard alleges the Obama administration manipulated intelligence assessments that found that Russia sought to tip the election in favor of Trump, with the purported goal of destroying Trump politically. Gabbard has recommended criminal charges, including against Obama himself, while pushing this nonsensical narrative.
The sloppiness of what Gabbard is presenting only confirms what has been widely suspected about her actions: that it’s a weapon of distraction.
While the reports bring a bit of new information to light about U.S. intelligence operations, they don’t dislodge the many well-substantiated assessments indicating Russia intervened in 2016 to hurt Hillary Clinton and boost Trump. The timing of the release does suggest, however, that Gabbard is scrambling to find some way to satisfy people in the MAGA base hungry for a new conspiracy theory as the administration tries to leave the Epstein story behind.
Gabbard’s maneuvering appears to be an attempt to put meat on the bones of Trump’s longtime narrative that all the investigations showing Russia tried to help Donald Trump win the 2016 election were a “hoax.” On Friday, she released a memo, emails and intelligence documents that she effectively claimed were proof that Russia didn’t try to interfere in the 2016 election. But as CNN points out, her main argument rested on a sleight of hand:
She cited an intelligence document that purportedly said Russia ‘did not attempt to affect the outcome of the election.’ In fact, that document — a President’s Daily Brief, or his daily intelligence report — merely said Russia hadn’t impacted the election results ‘by conducting malicious cyber activities against election infrastructure.’ “It was referring narrowly to a very specific (and severe) type of potential election interference. The Obama administration never alleged such interference took place or that Russia manipulated actual votes that were cast.”
In other words, Gabbard used a cherry-picked quote to conflate the idea that Russia didn’t actually target election infrastructure and attempt to alter vote counts with the idea that Russia didn’t interfere at all.
On Wednesday, Gabbard announced a new document release, which included a declassified report put together by Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee in 2020 about the 2017 intelligence community assessment of Russian interference. As NBC News reports, “The Republican report was emphatically rejected at the time by Democratic lawmakers on the panel who played no role in its creation.”
NBC News explains that the report found that even the deeply partisan Republican report found most of the 2017 intelligence community assessment on Russian interference in the election “sound,” but it took issue with the reliability of the sources it depended on to come to the conclusion that Russian President Vladimir Putin “aspired” to help Trump. That’s fine to document for the historical record, but it’s hardly some kind of smoking gun of a conspiracy.
And Gabbard conveniently skips over the fact that an incredibly rigorous bipartisan Senate investigation released the same year landed somewhere different. As NBC News summarizes it:
The 2020 Senate investigation, which spanned three years, involved more than 200 witnesses and reviewed more than a million documents, endorsed the intelligence agencies’ assessment that Russia had spread disinformation online and leaked stolen emails from the Democratic National Committee to undermine Clinton’s candidacy and bolster Trump’s prospects. Trump’s current secretary of state, Marco Rubio, was the acting chair of the Intelligence Committee at the time. He and every other member of the committee, both Republicans and Democrats, endorsed the report’s findings.” The Obama administration and intelligence community’s approach to the matter was also covered extensively through a Justice Department report in 2019, special counsel Robert Mueller’s report in 2019 and a report by special counsel John Durham in 2023. If there was some grand conspiracy by Obama officials to mess with the intelligence assessment and destroy Trump, both Republicans and Democrats had plenty of opportunity to find it. The sloppiness of what Gabbard is presenting only confirms what has been widely suspected about her actions: that it’s a weapon of distraction. And it doesn’t seem like a coincidence that she claims to have uncovered evidence of a shadowy “conspiracy” at the exact moment that Trump is being accused by both Democrats and Republicans of covering one up. It all looks like an attempt to find some red meat for the base. Fox News appears to be taking the bait, pushing the unsubstantiated Obama conspiracy theory on its shows at a far greater rate than the Epstein story. The appetite of Trump’s base, however, is less predictable on this story. At the same time, Gabbard’s new anti-Obama offensive also functions as an opportunity for her to move to the center of things in the White House, particularly after she clashed with Trump over Iran. As my colleague Steve Benen noted, “If the DNI were looking for a way to return to the president’s good graces, she apparently found one.” What better way to excite her boss than with a brand-new conspiracy theory?
Zeeshan Aleem is a writer and editor for MS NOW. Previously, he worked at Vox, HuffPost and Politico, and he has also been published in, among other places, The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Nation, and The Intercept. You can sign up for his free politics newsletter by clicking the link at the top of this bio. 
