Aaron Blake (11:56)
All right, first up, let's start with what the left is saying. The left describes Gabbard's findings as implausible and at odds with past reports endorsed by Republicans. Some say the report is an attempt to distract the public from the Jeffrey Epstein story. Others argue Gabbard's conclusions are deliberately misleading. In cnn, Aaron Blake wrote, gabbard's Russian interference claims directly contradict what other Trump officials have said. When Donald Trump sided with Vladimir Putin over his own intelligence community on the topic of Russia's interference in the 2016 US election, then Senator Marco Rubio sharply rebuked Trump. The Florida Republican said in 2018 that the intelligence community's assessment of 2016 is accurate. It's 100% accurate. The Russians interfered in our elections, blake said. But seven years later, it just keeps happening over and over again as Trump and his most loyal allies seek to sow doubts about the 2016 episode and punish their political enemies. That's now taken the form of Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, threatening criminal referrals and even floating allegations of treason for key officials in the Obama administration. Gabbard's commentary is especially striking when juxtaposed with those she serves within the second Trump administration. Rubio didn't just rebuke Trump for siding with Putin's denials back in 2018. He also spearheaded the Senate Intelligence Committee's big bipartisan Russia report in 2020, Blake wrote. The report concluded that Russia had engaged in an aggressive, multifaceted effort to influence or attempt to influence the outcome of the 2016 presidential election. It not only said that Russia had interfered, but also that it had done so to benefit Trump. In USA Today, Chris Brennan argued Gabbard yells Russia hoax to distract MAGA from Epstein for Trump Tulsi Gabbard was on the outs, literally and figuratively, with President Trump last month after contradicting him about Iran's nuclear program, which he was about to bomb. Gabbard, Trump's director of national intelligence, was shut out of planning meetings about Iran and pushed to the intelligence sidelines for asserting that Iran had not been trying to build a nuclear weapon. Brennan said she needed a way back inside Trump's bubble. The president's new Epstein files scandal offered an opportunity. Gabbard dug deep into the classics of Trump's hoax claims. She's claiming Obama's team manufactured intelligence to hobble Trump's impending presidency after he won. There's a hole in that theory. The Obama administration said shortly after the 2016 presidential election that hackers had not tampered with the election results, Brennan wrote. Gabbard is dredging back up Russian interference because American voters just don't buy what Trump has tried to sell them about the Epstein files that his administration is still keeping secret after he promised during last year's campaign to make them public. In Tech Dirt, Mike Masnik said Gabbard uses the Twitter files playbook to mislead. The pattern is always identical. Release narrow technical documents that most people won't understand, surround them with inflammatory innuendo, and then hand them off to gullible rubes like Matt Taibbi, who will falsely claim the biggest scandal in history just dropped, masnik wrote. Here's what actually happened. Russia absolutely tried to influence the 2016 election primarily to sow chaos and division in the U.S. this generally involved supporting Trump, who brought more chaos, and attacking Hillary Clinton, whom Putin despised from her time as secretary of state. This basic fact has been confirmed over and over again by multiple investigations, including those led by Republicans. The original report was narrowly focused on one thing that was widely no successful hack impacted the actual election, but it's being used to pretend. It proves that the Russians didn't try to influence the election at all, a thing we already knew they absolutely did, masning said. Gabbard then misrepresents Obama's request to the intelligence agency, following that initial assessment, to write an analysis about Russian attempts to influence the election as a whole, that is having seen the narrow report about a lack of success in hacking in to change votes. The request was a broader look at the many ways which Russia simply tried to influence the election, which is something entirely different than hacking voting infrastructure. These two things are not in conflict at all. Alright, that is it for what the left is saying, which brings us to what the right is saying. The right mostly views Gabbard's announcement as a major revelation that confirms Obama and others conspired to target Trump. Some contend the leaders of this effort should face criminal prosecution. Others say Republicans have resurfaced this story to their own detriment. In racket news, Mataibi suggested Obama is now squarely in Russiagate crosshairs. The documents in the change showed that not only former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper's office, but others, including the FBI, were relatively unconcerned about Russian interference. Figures like Virginia Senator and key Russiagate figure Mark Warner are already dismissing Gabbard's report as an attempt to cook the books by comparing apples and oranges, the apples being Russian efforts to attack election infrastructure, the oranges being influence operations, taibbi wrote. But emails dating back to September 2016 show a dismissive attitude towards both concepts, as well as a lack of conviction about Russia's ability to impact or disrupt the election outcome in any way. In sum, just before Obama was to receive a briefing that contained no reference to significant Russian interference, the briefing was called off and a high level meeting of White House security officials was convened, after which Obama himself tasked them with a new assessment that would lean toward a more aggressive conclusion. Taibbi said it's suspicious that a presidential daily briefing was postponed to make way for the intelligence community assessment ordered at Obama's request. Fishier yet that the evidence that Putin intended to help Trump came from a classified annex containing steel dossier material. In Fox News, Greg Jarrett wrote about how Obama and cronies created Trump Russia hoax and what happens next Newly revealed documents showed that in 2016, then President Barack Obama and his national security team manufactured and politicized phony intelligence to help frame Donald Trump as a Russian asset when they knew it was untrue, jarrett said. Treason is a strong term with an exceedingly high legal standard. So too is seditious conspiracy. The use of violence or force is often a central element for both. Closer to the mark are the other serious crimes. They include conspiracy to defraud the government and deprivation of rights under the color of the law, that is Using knowingly false or fabricated evidence to support a case against Trump and to obstruct or impair a lawful government function such as an election. The FBI is reportedly examining the possibility of bringing a grand conspiracy case that would encompass many of the above noted acts that were intended to unduly influence three presidential elections, 2016, 2020 and 2024, Jarrett wrote. The advantage of adopting this legal avenue is twofold. First, it would extend any expired statute of limitations to the date of more recent overt acts such as the raid on Mar A Lago or events thereafter. Second, it would allow any prosecutions to be brought in a venue other than Washington, D.C. where the endemic bias of jurors make it nearly impossible to gain convictions. In national review, Andrew C. McCarthy said Gabbard makes a frivolous argument. The Trump administration's decision to revive this episode, while titillating for the MAGA political base, is self sabotage. That is mainly because after months of scrutiny, the Trump CIA has reaffirmed the ICA's conclusion that 1 Russia sought to interfere in the 2016 election and 2 did so in order to denigrate Hillary Clinton, McCarthy wrote. The public position of President Trump and his most ardent supporters. The position that Gabbard reiterates is that Russiagate was a total hoax, a complete fabrication by Democrats without a shred of truth to it, concocted to undermine his presidency. This has always been a foolish stance. The Democrats caterwauling that Russia stole the 2016 election from Clinton was nonsense. It has long been widely recognized for what it is, a fever dream by which Democrats sought to avoid conceding the true cause of the party's loss, its nomination of a deeply unpopular scandal scarred politically flat footed candidate, McCarthy said. Yet by claiming that there was no evidence of Russian interference, the Trump camp invites correction, including now from the Trump administration's own CIA, and thereby turns into a matter of consequence, something that was utterly inconsequential. Alright, let's head over to Isaac for his take.
