Over target: Panicked liberal media attacks Gabbard’s ‘treasonous conspiracy’ claim

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard published a report on Wednesday that appeared to confirm the 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment on Russian election interference was a work of fiction comprising misquotes, unreliable reports, lies of omissions, and straight-out falsehoods.

Rather than admit fault or come to terms with the role it played in perpetuating an apparent hoax on the American people — one that set the stage for years of Russian-collusion smears, two congressional impeachments, multiple arrests, and greater tensions with a pre-eminent nuclear power — the liberal media is now desperately trying to both downplay the gravity of the newly declassified House Intelligence Committee majority staff report and spin the conclusions therein.

Refresher

The House Intelligence Committee report is a product of congressional investigators spending over 2,300 hours reviewing the ICA and its source reports, conducting dozens of interviews, and comparing the ICA analytic tradecraft against well-established intelligence reports.

According to the report, the intelligence community had no credible evidence of Russia working to help Trump win.

What’s more, the report — which Gabbard indicated provides evidence of a “treasonous conspiracy” — claimed that the ICA, which was released by the Obama administration just weeks before President Donald Trump’s inauguration in 2017:

• incorporated dubious claims despite high-level protest within the intelligence community;
• leaned on the bogus Steele dossier while failing to mention it was produced in part for the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign and had Russian links;
• omitted narrative-killing evidence such as Moscow’s withholding of damning information about Hillary Clinton’s health issues, which if released could have helped Trump; and
• propped the narrative that Russian President Vladimir Putin “aspired” to help Trump win on “one scant, unclear, and unverifiable fragment of a sentence” from a “substandard report” that CIA officers initially omitted but were ordered by then-CIA Director John Brennan to include despite protest.

The report also indicates that the Obama administration leaked falsehoods from the ICA to the media, which publications like the Washington Post dutifully printed.

Liberal media turns on another gaslight

CNN’s Kaitlan Collins did her apparent best on Wednesday to distract from the damning contents of the report by making its release about an imagined interpersonal drama between the president and his director of national intelligence.

‘Who was saying that?’

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 Photo (left): Kevin Dietsch/Getty Image; Photo (right): Ethan Miller/Getty Images

Collins suggested in question form that Gabbard was “only releasing these documents now to improve [her] standing with the president after he said that [her] intelligence assessments were wrong,” referencing Trump’s assertion last month that Gabbard was wrong in suggesting there was no evidence that Iran was constructing a nuclear weapon.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt asked Collins, “Who was saying that?”

Leavitt later added, “The only people who are suggesting that the director of national intelligence would release evidence to try to boost her standing with the president are the people in this room, who constantly try to sow distrust and chaos amongst the president’s Cabinet, and it is not working.”

The Washington Post, one of the chief proponents of the Russian collusion narrative, appears to have adopted a different strategy in attacking the report and its credibility.

Earlier in the week, the Post pushed an article asserting that Gabbard’s “seditious conspiracy” claim is “based on thin gruel.”

The article strategically assigned greater weight to the conclusions of previous investigations, including the Senate Intelligence Committee’s multi-volume report on the ICA, which “found the ICA presents a coherent and well-constructed intelligence basis for the case of unprecedented Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election,” and that “Moscow’s intent was to harm the Clinton campaign, tarnish an expected Clinton presidential administration, help the Trump campaign after Trump became the presumptive Republican nominee, and undermine the U.S. democratic process.”

Sarah Bedford of the Washington Examiner noted that the problem with Democrats and the media using conclusions of the Senate Intelligence Committee report to contradict the newly declassified House report and Gabbard’s corresponding claims is “it’s not clear that the Senate had the same level of access to source material” that CIA Director [John Ratcliffe] now has.”

“The conclusions about the Steele dossier not being a significant source for the ICA and about the CIA not wanting it included, for example, appear to come from interviews,” continued Bedford. “Brennan just denied again that he wanted it in the ICA when the committee interviewed him in 2018. But Ratcliffe’s memo is based on actual emails from 2016, which tell a completely different story.”

Bedford was referencing the declassified memo released last month by Ratcliffe, which criticized the 2017 ICA and identified “multiple procedural anomalies” in its preparation.

The Associated Press effectively told its readers not to believe their lying eyes in an article titled “Gabbard’s claims of an anti-Trump conspiracy are not supported by declassified documents.”

RELATED: If no one goes to jail, the coup was a success

 Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Like the Post, the AP leaned on the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report to suggest there were no politically motivated aspects in the Obama administration’s assessments, but it also refuted arguments that Gabbard did not appear to be making.

Gabbard told Fox News that there “was a shift, a 180-degree shift, from the intelligence community’s assessment leading up to the election to the one that President Obama directed be produced after Donald Trump won the election that completely contradicted those assessments that had come previously.”

Gabbard was referencing how the ICA concluded in early January 2017 that Russia was trying to boost Trump — yet just weeks earlier, the FBI’s director of counterintelligence and the DNI’s national intelligence officer made no such claim in their briefing to Congress on Vladimir Putin’s supposed leak operations.

The AP insinuated, however, that Gabbard was alternatively referring to the intelligence community’s consistent view that there were Russian efforts to manipulate the vote count and concluded “there was no shift.”

Despite the article’s framing, the AP acknowledged that “the material declassified this week reveals some dissent within the intelligence community about whether Putin wanted to help Trump or simply inflame the U.S.”; however, the AP suggested that the dissent detailed in the House report was business as usual and glossed over the fact that the debate concerned violations of analytic tradecraft standards and the inclusion of unreliable or false information.

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