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Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard on Friday released a slew of documents that she said implicate members of the Obama administration for “treasonous” behavior during the 2016 election.
The claims confuse the allegation that Russia interfered in the 2016 election with the idea that Russia actively tried to change results by hacking into voting systems. CNN’s Jeremy Herb and Katie Bo Lillis went through them and talked to people who worked on a bipartisan Senate review of the 2016 election.
“Wildly misleading” is how the information was described by one source in their report.
But that didn’t stop President Donald Trump from accusing former President Barack Obama of treason, a crime punishable by death in the US, when he was asked about it in the Oval Office on Tuesday. Trump made the accusation while appearing at an event to discuss trade with Philippines leader Ferdinand Marcos Jr.
Trump’s very long, meandering answer is a window into how his mind works. All roads lead back to immigration and his 2020 election loss.
Obama’s office issued a rare statement in response:
“Out of respect for the office of the presidency, our office does not normally dignify the constant nonsense and misinformation flowing out of this White House with a response. But these claims are outrageous enough to merit one,” said spokesman Patrick Rodenbush. “These bizarre allegations are ridiculous and a weak attempt at distraction. 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. These findings were affirmed in a 2020 report by the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee, led by then-Chairman Marco Rubio.”
Here’s a look at what Trump said, along with some context from CNN reporting.
(Trump said all of this in the Oval Office, which he has bedecked with gold filigree, portraits from the White House vault and a copy, behind a curtain, of the Declaration of Independence.)
(From CNN’s report: The new allegations from Gabbard lean on assessments before the election and statements from Obama-era intelligence officials finding that Russia did not alter the election results through cyber-attacks aimed at infiltrating voting systems. But the January 2017 intelligence community assessment never concluded that Russian cyberattacks altered the outcome of the 2016 election or compromised any election infrastructure in the first place, though state voting systems were probed.
Instead, the assessment focused on Russia’s influence campaign ordered by President Vladimir Putin and cyber operations against US and Democratic Party officials, including the hacked emails released by WikiLeaks.)
(Treason, the crime of trying to overthrow the government, could be punishable by death in the US. Even when the Department of Justice during the Biden administration accused Trump of election interference for trying to upend the 2020 election, it did not accuse him of treason.)
(We anticipate seeing them, although previously promised document dumps have failed to live up to expectations.)
(The Steele dossier has been discredited, but the larger conclusion of the US intelligence community that Russia tried to meddle in the US election has stood. So has the Mueller report’s conclusion that there were interactions between Trump’s campaign and Russians during the 2016 campaign. Mueller’s report did not conclude that Trump’s campaign colluded with Russians or that Trump committed a crime. It also did not exonerate him.)
(At the time, few organizations published the full Steele dossier in large part because it could not be corroborated, unlike Russia’s election meddling, which was documented by US intelligence agencies.)
(Related: Read CNN’s 2021 report, The Steel Dossier: A reckoning)
(There’s no evidence for this type of conspiracy.)
(There’s still no evidence the 2020 election was rigged. There’s plenty of evidence that Trump tried to subvert the results. The inflation problem is not necessarily solved, especially if Trump’s tariffs go into effect.)
(Trump frequently tries to claim a large portion of undocumented immigrants are murderers. There’s no evidence for that. Read one of CNN’s Fact Checks of Trump’s claims about undocumented immigrants).
(Trump did win in 2024. It was far from a landslide.)
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