Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has released a memorandum on the intelligence community’s assessment of Russian participation in the 2016 presidential election, that includes email excerpts and a time line. Gabbard herself says that these documents reveal a “treasonous conspiracy” against the Trump administration and the American people.
I yield to no one in my contempt for James Comey, John Brennan and others who perverted America’s intelligence apparatus to advance the interests of the Democratic Party. But these most recently released materials seem to me to be of limited significance.
The memorandum includes several emails, written both before and after the 2016 election, that say there is no evidence of Russia attacking America’s election infrastructure. Thus:
Russia probably is not trying to going to be able to? influence the election by using cyber means to manipulate computer-enabled election infrastructure. Russia probably is using cyber means primarily to influence the election by stealing campaign party data and leaking select items, and it is also using public propaganda.
Similarly:
We judge that foreign adversaries do not have and will probably not obtain the capabilities to successfully execute widespread and undetected cyber attacks on the diverse set of information technologies and infrastructures used to support the November 2016 presidential election.
And after the election:
Foreign adversaries did not use cyberattacks on election infrastructure to alter the US Presidential election outcome.
***
We have no evidence of cyber manipulation of election infrastructure intended to alter results.
That seems very clear: the Russians did not attack voting machines, vote tabulations, etc., so as to alter the election’s results.
The memorandum then describes a White House meeting on December 9, 2016, that was presided over by President Obama and included most of the usual suspects. Following that meeting, the tenor of Obama administration communications on Russian “interference” in the election changed. It became more alarmist, and administration officials leaked assessments of Russia’s activity that were exaggerated and claimed, without any strong support, that Russia had “interfered” in the election in order to help Donald Trump win.
But I see no indication that Obama and his minions said anything that contradicted the intelligence assessment that Russia did not attack infrastructure so as to alter election results. On the contrary, the memo itself quotes Obama on December 16: “President Obama admits there is no ‘evidence of machines being tampered with’ during the election.”
And I don’t recall that the Democrats alleged, at any time, that there was a Russian cyber attack on election infrastructure. On the contrary, when Robert Mueller brought his absurdly weak indictment of 13 Russian individuals and entities for “meddling” in the 2016 election, it recited their purchase of a tiny number of Facebook ads, but did not allege that they mounted any kind of cyber attack against election infrastructure.
An increasing body of information on the misuse of the intelligence agencies and the FBI to front for the Democratic Party and to undermine the Trump administration has been made public. Just two weeks ago, the CIA released an important report on this subject that we wrote about here. That report indicates that DNI John Brennan insisted on including the fabricated Steele dossier as the basis for anti-Trump assessments, even though the responsible intelligence professionals said that it “did not meet even the most basic tradecraft standards.” There is more, besides, in that report.
So on balance, I don’t think the most recent revelations from the DNI add much to our understanding of the Democrats’ partisan misuse of intelligence. That said, the complete story of that scandal, likely the worst in American history, remains to be written.
