CNN dumped out of a briefing with Trump Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard to fact-check her wild claims about a “conspiracy” led by former President Barack Obama.
Gabbard was the opening act for White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt at Wednesday’s White House press briefing, during which she rolled out a document dump meant to support President Donald Trump’s baseless and discredited accusation of “treason” against Obama and his top officials.
But Director Gabbard was barely two minutes into her presentation on Wednesday’s edition of CNN News Central when co-anchor Jim Sciutto broke in to push back, and brought fact-checker Daniel Dale in to boot:
DNI TULSI GABBARD: Multiple intelligence community assessments released in the months leading up to the November 2016 election concluded that Russia had neither the intent nor capability to impact the outcome of the U.S. Election. On December 5th-,JIM SCIUTTO: We’ve been listening there to the Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, continuing on what has now been a multi-day effort, not only with public statements like this, but release of documents, to attempt to back up the quite extreme allegation that President Obama is guilty of treason and that he worked in some sort of conspiracy with Hillary Clinton, et cetera, in the assessment by the intelligence community at the time that Russia interfered in the 2016 election.Um… And part of that assessment at the time was that the
Kremlin had a preference in that election for Donald Trump.There’s a lot of conflation going on here. And going beyond what the intelligence showed.I should note having covered that election quite closely that the assessment never said that Russia changed the outcome of the election access to voting systems votes etcetera.We’re joined now by CNN’s Jeff Zeleny but also CNN’s Daniel Dale.Daniel, you’ve been doing a great job of quite meticulously fact-checking each of the claims here. Can you help us by fact- checking some of the things that the DNI Tulsi Gabbard said just then?DANIEL DALE: Yeah, so obviously I haven’t seen all the materials that she in that position has seen, but she has been attacking this intelligence assessment from early 2017 put out by the intelligence community and suggesting that it contradicted previous findings that the intelligence community had previously concluded that Russia could not alter vote counts and so on.As you said, that early 2017 assessment did not find that there was any alteration of vote counts, that Russia had changed the outcome.Rather, it found that Russia had made this kind of effort through hacking democratic organizations, through a social media influence dissemination organization.And I think it’s very important to note that the Republican-controlled Senate Intelligence Committee reviewed these findings about Russia’s actions and found that not only were theywell-supported, but also that there had not been political interference by the Obama administration with the intelligence community in developing these conclusions.So this suggestion that there was some treasonous activity by former President Obama basically in simply asking the intelligence committee or directing the intelligence to come up with an assessment of Russia’s well-documented activities is simply not borne out by the evidence that DNI Gabbard and President Trump have presented so far in the last week.JIM SCIUTTO: I mean, we should note that there were multiple findings of that intelligence assessment. One was, and this one has really never been disputed by Republicans or Democrats, was that Russia interfered in the election via disinformation.Then you had other elements, one of which was that the preference of the Kremlin was for Donald Trump, and that was based in part on sources in Russia, but it was also based on the nature of the interference, stealing Hillary Clinton emails, John Podesta emails from the DNC, and then releasing those during the campaign.Particularly at times where it might have impact, one of which was after the release of the Access Hollywood tape, right, that lots of focus at the time was on that tape, damaging to Donald Trump, and then you had this release of emails.There were a number of things that went into that assessment, but we should note that intelligence assessments often have layers, one, and different degrees of confidence witheach of the findings.
Watch above via CNN News Central.