The unqualified director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, is again proving her unfitness by claiming that former President Barack Obama and his administration engaged in a “treasonous conspiracy” regarding the investigation of Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election.
In Gabbard’s retelling, based on some declassified materials, Obama and his administration worked to manufacture what the MAGA faithful have come to know as the “Russia hoax,” which is to say the reality that Vladimir Putin’s Russia endeavored to help Donald Trump in the 2016 election. Trump himself has now adopted this framing, referencing Obama’s “coup” and posting an AI-generated video of him smiling as the former president is arrested and put in prison.
The documents show nothing of the sort, obviously. It’s particularly galling for Trump of all people to accuse a former president of attempting to orchestrate a coup when he’s the only U.S. president to have actually done so. Remember Jan. 6?
The question of whether Russia tried to influence the 2016 presidential election is not an unexamined one; it is perhaps one of the most deeply investigated issues in recent American political history, having been the subject of multiple congressional and Justice Department inquiries, which all established to some extent that Russia did, in fact, intervene. There was no hoax.
In any case, as with being able to assert that Trump attempted a coup after the 2020 election by simply seeing it unfold on live TV with your own eyes, everyone witnessed the meddling during the 2016 election. Putin’s troll army and bots were all over the place, and were documented by entities beyond the federal government.