President Obama was the central figure in an effort to discredit the 2016 election results by politicizing the intelligence community against its unexpected winner, President Trump, according to newly declassified documents.
Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard filed a criminal referral to the Justice Department, citing Obama's role in a "treasonous conspiracy."
"These documents detail a treasonous conspiracy by officials at the highest levels of the Obama White House to subvert the will of the American people and try to usurp the President from fulfilling his mandate,” she wrote on X.
The intelligence community was initially skeptical that Russia interfered in the election, but those findings apparently changed after Trump's upset victory against Hillary Clinton.
A declassified intelligence brief that was prepared for Obama, dated December 8, 2016, had concluded that Russia did not make any impact on election infrastructure beyond hacking a voter registration database in Illinois.
The brief was not published as expected after the FBI, which was investigating Trump at the time, registered a "dissent."
President Obama ordered a new, "comprehensive" assessment of Russian interference following a December 9 White House meeting, where top national security officials, including James Clapper, John Brennan, Andrew McCabe, and Susan Rice, met to discuss Russia.
"The IC is prepared to produce an assessment per the President’s request," Clapper's assistant wrote, "that pulls together the information we have on the tools Moscow used and the actions it took to influence the 2016 election."
The final intelligence community assessment published weeks later on January 7 "directly contradicted the IC assessments that were made throughout the previous six months,” Gabbard said.
The IC assessment concluded in no uncertain language that Vladimir Putin directed an interference campaign with the goal of getting Trump elected.
The claim that Russia interfered in the election to help Trump would fuel a years-long investigation of "Russian collusion" that came up empty.
The FBI's Trump-Russia probe began in July 2016 and involved spying on Trump's campaign using bogus opposition research procured by the Clinton camp. The investigation would eventually come to cast a cloud over Trump's first term.
The individuals involved in the January 2017 IC assessment included FBI director James Comey and CIA director John Brennan, both notorious critics of Trump who are currently under investigation by the FBI.
“Their goal was to subvert the will of the American people and enact what was essentially a years-long coup with the objective of trying to usurp the President from fulfilling the mandate bestowed upon him by the American people," Gabbard said.
