Tulsi Gabbard Summarizes the Case Against President Obama During the White House Briefing

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt walked through the allegations being made by DNI Tulsi Gabbard at today’s White House press briefing. After several minutes she then turned the podium over to Gabbard herself. This was not a brief statement. Gabbard spoke for about 10-12 minutes and then spent another 20 minutes at the podium answering questions.

“There is irrefutable evidence that details how President Obama and his national security team directed the creation of an intelligence community assessment that they knew was false,” Gabbard said. “They knew it would promote this contrived narrative that Russia interfered in the 2016 election to help President Trump win, selling it to the American people as though it were true. It wasn’t.”…

“All come back to and confirm the same report: There was a gross politicization and manipulation of intelligence by the Obama administration intended to delegitimize President Trump even before he was inaugurated, ultimately usurping the will of the American people,” Gabbard said…

“We have referred and will continue to refer all of these documents to the Department of Justice and the FBI, to investigate the criminal implications of this for the evidence,” Gabbard said. “Correct. The evidence that we have found, and that we have released, directly point to President Obama leading the manufacturing of this intelligence assessment. There are multiple pieces of evidence and intelligence that confirm that fact.”

I covered some of this material earlier here, but one of the interesting claims raised by DNI Gabbard which I hadn’t heard before is that Russia actually held back the most damaging information it had on Hillary because they expected her to win and wanted to release it later when she was in office. That does seem to undermine the claim they were going all out to help Trump.

Politico has a report on this which clarifies what Gabbard is and is not claiming.

Gabbard claimed the new documents offered “irrefutable evidence” that “Obama and his national security team directed the creation of an intelligence community assessment that they knew was false.”

While Gabbard acknowledged that Russia wanted to sow discord in the election, she said it did not collude with Trump or prefer him to win. As proof, Gabbard said Russian President Vladimir Putin’s decision not to release damaging information about Hillary Clinton — whose 2016 campaign was targeted by a barrage of Wikileaks revelations — showed that the Kremlin did not have a preferred candidate.

But the new information does not dispute the intelligence community’s 2016 conclusion that Russia and its president meddled in the election in hopes of damaging Clinton, who, as Gabbard noted, Moscow thought would win. It largely questions how the intelligence community arrived at its high-confidence assessment that Putin “aspired” to see Trump win.

That really is the crux of this. No one is denying that Russia meddled in the election. The issue is the specific claim, which appears to have been injected into the daily briefing, that Russia wanted Trump to win. That claim does not seem to be strongly supported and there is at least some evidence that analysts thought it was a real stretch at the time. But of course that claim dovetailed perfectly with the Steele Dossier and the claims that Trump was colluding with Russia to steal the election. It really set up what came next: 

The briefing of the dossier to Trump led to the immediate leaking of that fact which gave CNN a green light to start reporting on the existence of the dossier. It also gave Buzzfeed a (very thin) justification to publish the whole thing. (Personally, I still wondering who was whispering in Ben Smith’s ear when he made that decision. I’m not talking about sources. Those don’t matter because every outlet had the dossier by that point. I’m talking about the people who were talking to him and pushing for it to be released. Anyone from Clinton’s camp or Obama’s camp?)

After her statement summarizing the case against Obama, Brennan, Comey and others, Gabbard was asked if there was the possibility of charges being brought against former President Obama. She replied, “We have referred and continue to refer all of these documents to the Deparment of Justice and the FBI to investigate the criminal implications of this.” She added, “The evidence that we have found and that we have released directly points to President Obama leading the manufacturing of the intelligence assessment.”

Here’s the full briefing but I’m cueing this up to Gabbard’s statement.

Update: Here’s what CNN viewers saw.

CNN, complicit in perpetrating the Russia Collusion Hoax for years — cuts off @TulsiGabbard as she lays out information about the Obama Admin’s manufacture of the hoax.

This is CNN. pic.twitter.com/1YhOEwZD96

— Western Lensman (@WesternLensman) July 23, 2025

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