US spy chief Gabbard claims Obama administration tried to undermine Trump in 2016

WASHINGTON – The Office of the Director of National Intelligence on July 18 issued the latest in a series of reports from the Trump administration attempting to undermine the eight-year-old assessment that Russia favoured the election of Mr Donald Trump in 2016.

Ms Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, said the information she was releasing showed a “treasonous conspiracy in 2016” by top Obama administration officials to harm Mr Trump.

Democrats denounced the effort as politically motivated, error-ridden and in contradiction with previous reviews of the assessment.

Representative Jim Himes of Connecticut, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, called Ms Gabbard’s accusation of treason “baseless”.

Intelligence agencies and Senate investigators spent years reviewing the work, and concluded that during the 2016 election, the Russians conducted probing operations of election systems to see if they could change vote outcomes.

While they extracted voter registration data in Illinois and Arizona, and probed in other states, there was no evidence that Moscow’s hackers attempted to actually change votes.

The Obama administration assessment never contended that Russian hackers manipulated votes.

Russia also conducted influence operations to change public opinion. That included using fake social media posts to sow division among Americans and leaking documents stolen from the Democratic National Committee to denigrate Mrs Hillary Clinton, the Democratic presidential nominee.

Multiple reviews, including a Republican-led Senate report, backed the findings of US spy agencies in late 2016 that Russia was trying to influence the election by damaging Mrs Clinton’s campaign and bolstering Trump.

Among the Republican senators on the intelligence committee that produced the various reports on Russian influence operations was Mr Marco Rubio of Florida, now the US secretary of state.

The new report by Ms Gabbard’s staff conflates those two activities by the Russians and tries to suggest that the Obama administration forced the intelligence community to alter its conclusions.

The findings by Ms Gabbard’s office highlighted an e-mail from an assistant to a previous director of national intelligence, Mr James Clapper, that said former president Barack Obama was seeking a new assessment of the “tools Moscow used and actions it took to influence the 2016 election”.

Still, it has long been known that Mr Obama had tasked intelligence officials to review the material they had collected and report what they had learned before he left office. At the time, Obama administration officials said they worried that the intelligence assessment would be buried when Mr Trump took over for his first term.

A Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) review released in July took issue with the speed with which that assessment was conducted. The CIA then referred Mr John Brennan, the agency’s former director, to the  Federal Bureau of Investigation for criminal investigation.

The report released on July 18 highlighted that there was “no indication of a Russian threat to directly manipulate the actual vote count”, then contrasted that with the spy agencies’ ultimate conclusion in December 2016 that Russian President Vladimir Putin “aspired to help President-elect Trump’s election chances”.

The report focused on a decision intelligence officials made at the time against producing an article for the president’s daily intelligence briefing that would have said that the Russians “did not impact recent US election results by conducting malicious cyber activities against election infrastructure”.

But Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the intelligence committee, said the new report compared two different things: Russian attempts to hack into voting systems and Russian influence operations meant to sway public opinion.

“This is one more example of the director of national intelligence trying to cook the books,” Mr Warner said. “We’re talking about apples and oranges. The Russians were not successful at manipulating our election infrastructure, nor did we say they were.”

The influence operations that the intelligence community reported, and the Senate Intelligence Committee studied extensively, were a different effort, he said.

Mr Warner noted that as recently as March, the intelligence community reported that Russia had continued its malign influence efforts to sow dissent in the West.

The report found that “Moscow probably believes information operations efforts to influence US elections are advantageous”, and that undermining the integrity of American elections was a key goal.

“They acknowledged that Russia’s effort to meddle goes on. That was an assessment under her watch,” he said, referring to Ms Gabbard.

Mr Warner said his committee examined the effort to produce the intelligence assessment in December 2016 and found no attempt by Mr Obama or senior officials to manipulate the findings. NYTIMES