Trump Renews Lie That Russia Did Not Help Him In 2016, With Tulsi Gabbard's Help

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard leaves U.S. Capitol after a Senate Appropriations Subcommittee hearing on Monday, June 16, in Washington.Nine years after soliciting and then accepting help from Russia to win the 2016 election, Donald Trump is yet again falsely claiming he got no such assistance, this time with the backing of his Russia-sympathetic director of national intelligence.“These documents detail a treasonous conspiracy by officials at the highest levels of the Obama White House,” Tulsi Gabbard wrote on Friday in a series of social media posts, beginning the latest round of Trump’s many attempts to rewrite the history of his first election victory.Trump in the days since has repeatedly posted articles and videos of Gabbard’s interviews about the matter, accusing former President Barack Obama and his aides of the “highest level Election Fraud” and telling Gabbard to “keep it coming!!!”He even posted a fake TikTok video depicting the FBI arresting Obama and then an image showing Obama and his top former aides wearing orange jail garb.In reality, Gabbard’s claims confuse facts previously determined and acknowledged — that Russian intelligence agencies did not infiltrate voting systems — with a key conclusion reached by both special counsel Robert Mueller and the Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee: Russia actively worked to help Trump win.“Putin and the Russian Government demonstrated a preference for candidate Trump,” the Senate report stated.“She’s fabricating a scandal as part of a cover-up, namely the Trump administration’s efforts to keep the Epstein files under wrap,” said Ned Price, a former spokesman for the National Security Council in the Obama administration. “Gabbard’s trick here is a pretty obvious one: She’s intentionally conflating hacking and influencing.”Gabbard’s office did not respond to a HuffPost query.The White House press office, asked about the provenance of the video Trump had shared, instead released a statement supporting Gabbard’s efforts. “The president and his entire administration are committed to unearthing wrongdoing and holding any individual accountable for this gross abuse of power and blatant conspiracy against President Trump and his supporters,” spokesman Harrison Fields said.In any case, Trump’s use of Russian assistance to win in 2016 was done entirely in the open. That summer, he publicly called on Russia to “find” his opponent’s deleted emails from her private server.The Russian-aligned group WikiLeaks began releasing the material stolen from the Hillary Clinton campaign the same day that news broke of Trump’s infamous “grab-’em-by-the-pussy” video.Trump began using it in his interviews and appearances three days later and then daily for the remaining month of the campaign — even though he had learned in August that the material had been stolen by Russian spies.“WikiLeaks! I love WikiLeaks,” Trump told an audience in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, on October 10.“I’ll tell you, this WikiLeaks stuff is unbelievable,” Trump said on October 12 in Ocala, Florida. “It tells you the inner heart. You’ve got to read it and you’ve got to maybe get it, because they’re not putting it out.”That was the same day the WikiLeaks Twitter account sent a direct message to Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr., asking his father to highlight the stolen emails and offering a web link for Trump to advertise. Fifteen minutes after that direct message, candidate Trump sent out a tweet praising WikiLeaks. Two days later, Donald Trump Jr. sent out the link WikiLeaks had provided. Tangled Up With UkraineTrump’s lies about not receiving Russian assistance are not new. Throughout 2017 and 2018, he repeatedly claimed “NO COLLUSION” in interviews and social media posts.Collusion, though, is not a crime defined in the US criminal code, even as it accurately describes Trump’s knowing acceptance of Russian assistance in that presidential campaign. Trump’s then-lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, even acknowledged that in a 2018 interview with HuffPost, defending Trump’s actions because using the Russian information was not proscribed by law.“it isn’t illegal ... It was sort of like a gift,” he said. “And you’re not involved in the illegality of getting it.”And ever since Mueller’s report concluded that it could not find evidence of a criminal conspiracy behind that overt cooperation, Trump took to claiming that the entire investigation was a “hoax.”Trump, with the active encouragement of Giuliani, went even further and began claiming that not only did he not receive help from Russia in 2016, but it was Clinton getting the foreign help — from Ukraine.That happened to be a conspiracy theory concocted by Russian intelligence as part of a broader effort to claim that the demise of the pro-Russia Viktor Yanukovych regime in Ukraine was part of an American plot — a so-called “colour revolution.”And it was Giuliani’s efforts to find proof of this counter theory that ultimately led to Trump trying to extort Ukraine’s new president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, into announcing an investigation into then-presidential candidate Joe Biden. Trump ultimately was impeached for that effort but was not removed from office because all but one Republican senator declined to convict him.“The most notable thing about the recycled nonsense that Tulsi Gabbard is peddling is that instead of providing independent intelligence analysis as she is supposed to do she is pandering to Trump’s obsession with finding evidence that Ukraine helped Clinton in 2016,” said Norm Eisen, a former ethics lawyer in the Obama White House who later worked on the House’s impeachment effort over Ukraine.“Perhaps he has a guilty conscience because of how Russia benefited his campaign that year when they hacked the DNC immediately following Trump’s invitation to do just that.” Russia, Russia, Russia, Nearly A Decade OnThat first impeachment — he was impeached again in 2021, this time for his attempted coup to remain in power despite having lost the 2020 election — appeared to have soured Trump on Ukraine for years going forward.When Putin began a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Trump called him “savvy” and a “genius” for having done so. During an Oval Office visit with Zelenskyy, Trump berated him and essentially blamed him for having gotten invaded.And Trump, until only recently, continued to offer kind words for Putin. During a February photo opportunity with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, Trump recalled the Russia probes and claimed that Putin had also been falsely accused.“We had to go through the Russian hoax together. That was not a good thing. That was not fair. That was a rigged deal and had nothing to do with Russia,” Trump said.Gabbard’s string of social media posts continue to push Trump’s claims, even though her “revelation” that Russia had not successfully altered any votes was never in dispute.Intelligence officials in late 2016 never claimed that Russia had hacked voting systems. Indeed, an Oct. 7, 2016, warning issued jointly by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Department of Homeland Security stated that it found no evidence that elections equipment had been compromised. However, the statement did say that Russia was trying to influence the election using emails stolen and then released to groups like WikiLeaks.Both the Mueller report and the one prepared by the Senate intelligence committee, at the time chaired by now-Secretary of State Marco Rubio, repeated that point. Both also agreed that Russia wanted Trump to win and worked to make it happen.“In just about every public statement, reflecting the underlying intelligence, the Obama administration was clear that Russia did not hack or otherwise mechanically manipulate the vote,” Price said. “But the intelligence was clear and, as such, so was the public messaging: That Russia had a favorite in its influence operations: Donald Trump.”

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