‘Gabbard Did Not Get the Goods’: Conservative Trump-Russia Collusion Theory Critic Debunks Obama ‘Treason’ Claim
President Donald Trump stands with Tulsi Gabbard and her husband Abraham Williams after she was sworn in as the Director of National Intelligence in the Oval Office at the White House, Wednesday, Feb. 12, 2025, in Washington. (Photo/Alex Brandon)
The Free Press’s Eli Lake debunked Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard’s incendiary claim that former President Barack Obama was at the head of a “treasonous conspiracy” to undermine President Donald Trump in a piece that saw him declare that she failed to “get the goods” in a new column for the right-leaning outlet.
Lake, a conservative and longtime critic of the investigation into whether Trump colluded with the Russian government during his 2016 presidential campaign, rearticulated his view that “Russiagate was a nothingburger” and that there’s a story to be told about “how Trump was framed by Hillary Clinton’s own collusion with the FBI to turn her campaign’s bogus research into an unwarranted probe into the elected president” before delving into Gabbard’s claims.
“The document at the center of Gabbard’s claims is the January 6, 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment,” wrote Lake. “According to Gabbard, the decision to publish this assessment, ordered by Obama at the end of 2016, itself constituted a conspiracy 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.'”
He continued:
As someone who was an early critic of the Russiagate narrative, I can report that Gabbard did not get the goods. Gabbard’s evidence mainly relies on declassified intelligence assessments that state that Russia lacked the capability to change the tallies of state and local voting machines without being detected by the Department of Homeland Security, the National Security Agency, and the FBI. That is true as far as it goes. But the original charge was not that Russia hacked the polling stations in the 2016 election. It was that it influenced the elections by hacking the Hillary Clinton campaign’s emails and then leaking them to the internet.
None of the evidence Gabbard has produced contradicts that claim.
“Russiagate really was a scandal. The FBI relied on bogus opposition research generated by the Clinton campaign to keep an unwarranted investigation into the Trump campaign alive after he was elected. The elite press swallowed the anonymous hype whole from former Obama officials and intelligence community leakers. The first three years of Trump’s presidency were consumed in a non-scandal treated by Trump’s opponents as the second coming of Watergate. But that scandal has largely been adjudicated,” concluded Lake. “In the end, Trump secured his own vengeance. He won the 2024 election and is president today. That ought to be enough.”
