White House trots out Tulsi Gabbard to push narrative Obama led Russian interference claims and ‘coup’ against Trump
Donald Trump’s intelligence director Tulsi Gabbard took over the White House briefing room Wednesday to continue pressing her narrative about a “coup” supposedly launched by Barack Obama.
The latest conspiracy has been pressed by both Gabbard and President Donald Trump since the weekend as the administration returns to the “Russiagate” investigation as an apparent diversion while Trump is facing uproar from his base over his administration’s efforts to tamp down on speculation surrounding the death and crimes of Jeffrey Epstein, a convicted pedophile.
In early July, the Department of Justice and FBI declared in a joint statement that no “client list” detailing Epstein’s co-conspirators could be found within the DOJ’s files; the statement also reiterated the agencies’ conclusion that Epstein died by suicide in 2019.
On Wednesday, the president’s weeks-long effort to find a distraction to turn his base’s focus from that statement resulted in the director of the U.S. intelligence community declaring behind the White House podium that former President Obama ordered intelligence assessments to be doctored to include the assertion that Russia was working directly to elect Trump.
Gabbard called the investigation into Trump’s 2016 campaign a years-long “coup” orchestrated by the former president, something that Obama dismissively rejected in a rare statement this week condemning the Trump administration’s latest claims.
“There is irrefutable evidence that detailed how President Obama and his national security team directed the creation of an intelligence community assessment that they knew was false,” Gabbard told reporters.
“They manufactured findings from shoddy sources, they suppressed evidence and credible intelligence that disproved their false claims. They disobeyed traditional trade craft intelligence community standards, and withheld the truth from the American people,” she said.
“In doing so, they conspired to subvert the will of the American people,” she continued, later asserting that the supposedly serious changes to ODNI assessments (which in reality do not show a difference in conclusion) amounted to “a years long coup against the incoming president United States, Donald Trump.”
Gabbard’s report, released last week, closely followed an article from the Wall Street Journal purporting to contain a note from Trump to Epstein as part of the latter’s 50th birthday celebration in 2003.
The note, framed as an imagined dialogue between the two men, alludes to a shared “secret” between the two. The U.S. president strongly denied the note’s authenticity and swiftly filed a $10 billion lawsuit against the WSJ, it’s parent company News Corp and founder Rupert Murdoch, among others.
With the Jeffrey Epstein saga consuming more and more of the media atmosphere every day, the White House turned late last week to Barack Obama and the FBI investigation into his first campaign for the presidency as Trump’s aides seek to move the news cycle along.
The memo authored by Gabbard last week, which she summarized on Tuesday, accuses the Obama administration of lying to the American public about Russia’s supposed interest in seeing Trump elected. In reality, straight-news coverage of the 2016 election largely centered around the reality, verified by both the FBI’s special counsel investigation headed up by Robert Mueller and a bipartisan probe conducted by the Senate Intelligence Committee.
Russian-backed hackers struck the servers of the Democratic National Committee in 2016, then published those materials online in an effort to damage the candidacy of Hillary Clinton. Russian influence campaigns on social media spanned a wide range of efforts including backing Trump, opposing Clinton, and disseminating misinformation.
Gabbard’s memo also mischaracterized the general assessment of the American intelligence community in 2016: that Russian intelligence agents had not attemped to directly influence vote totals through the hacking of election infrastructure, a finding which her office seemed to conflate with an absence of any Russian influence efforts altogether.
