from the not-this-nonsense-again dept
I’ve been warning people since the beginning of the year to expect the Trump regime to use the Twitter Files playbook on the US government and now we’re seeing exactly that play out. Trump is facing a bunch of pushback over the Jeffrey Epstein nonsense, so he needed some big new distraction quickly. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard stepped up Friday with a supposed bombshell, claiming to have discovered that the Obama administration concocted false intelligence reports that Russia tried to influence the 2016 election.
This is deliberate disinformation using the exact same Twitter Files playbook. The pattern is always identical: release narrow technical documents that most people won’t understand, surround them with inflammatory innuendo, then hand them off to gullible rubes like Matt Taibbi who will falsely claim the biggest scandal in history just dropped.
The “Russia Hoax” claim has been a central argument among Trump supporters for years, but it’s based on ever-shifting definitions. To understand why Gabbard’s latest “revelation” is manufactured bullshit, you need to understand what actually happened with Russian interference in 2016.
Here’s what actually happened: Russia absolutely tried to influence the 2016 election, primarily to sow chaos and division in the US. This generally involved supporting Trump (who brought more chaos) and attacking Hillary Clinton (whom Putin despised from her time as Secretary of State). This basic fact has been confirmed over and over again by multiple investigations (including those led by Republicans).
There was some overly hyped nonsense regarding Russia “colluding” (not a technical term) with the Trump campaign and then some unsubstantiated rumors from the Steele Dossier that appear unlikely to be true.
And then you have a bunch of extreme cultish partisans on both sides of the aisle who claimed too much. Some Democrats were way too credulous in believing that Russia worked hand-in-hand with Trump and did way more than they actually did. They were too quick to assume the worst at every turn with no proof. And they—not unlike QAnon folks—kept expecting some big bombshell to drop from something like the Mueller report.
The reality was much more mundane. Russia did seek to influence the election through various means, though it’s not really clear they had all that much success. MAGA folks have turned this into the “Russia, Russia, Russia hoax” claiming that because the most extreme versions of the narrative (“collusion” “pee tape”) didn’t bear out, it means that Russia was wholly uninvolved.
But that’s nonsense.
It is widely confirmed across multiple research reports from multiple sources, including one led by Republicans in the Senate that, yes, absolutely, Russia sought to influence the election in favor of Donald Trump. The Senate Intelligence Committee in 2019 (during the Trump admin when Republicans had the majority in the Senate) confirmed that Russia used social media to “sow societal discord and influence the outcome of the 2016 election.” That was a report led by Senator Richard Burr. A follow-up effort led by current Secretary of State Marco Rubio showed the same thing. There wasn’t “collusion” (a term that has no legal meaning here) but there was plenty to be concerned about. Here’s Rubio’s own quote:
We can say, without any hesitation, that the Committee found absolutely no evidence that then-candidate Donald Trump or his campaign colluded with the Russian government to meddle in the 2016 election.
What the Committee did find however is very troubling. We found irrefutable evidence of Russian meddling.
The report also noted that:
Paul Manafort’s presence on the Trump Campaign and proximity to then-Candidate Trump created opportunities for Russian intelligence services to exert influence over, and acquire confidential information on, the Trump Campaign.
Remember: this was a bipartisan, Republican-led effort, released during Trump’s presidency, led by Marco Rubio. The conclusion is unambiguous: Russia tried to influence the 2016 election.
That’s all an awful lot of prelude, but it’s important to know about in order to understand what has happened recently. As detailed earlier this month at Lawfare, the CIA released an “internal tradecraft review” analyzing the intelligence community assessment that was released in early January of 2017, exploring one single line in that initial report. The report included a line saying the intelligence community believed, with high confidence, that “Putin and the Russian Government aspired to help President-elect Trump’s election chances when possible by discrediting Secretary Clinton and publicly contrasting her unfavorably to him.”
The original report attributed the “high confidence” in this particular claim to the CIA and FBI, while noting the NSA had “moderate confidence” in that claim. The new “tradecraft review” simply analyzes whether or not the CIA should have had “high confidence” in that claim and ends by saying that because of the word “aspire” and the evidence the CIA had on hand, it maybe should have said it had “moderate” confidence rather than high.
This is… not that big a deal. Basically, they’re saying that the CIA said it was slightly more confident than it actually was about Putin’s intent to help Trump. But it never denies that the assessment was still that Putin wanted to help Trump, as multiple other reports have said.
That takes us to Friday’s “revelation.” What Gabbard actually revealed was an intelligence assessment in December of 2016 that said that Russia was unsuccessful in one narrow thing: hacking into US voting infrastructure to change votes.
The key line:
We assess that foreign adversaries did not use cyber attacks on election infrastructure to alter the US Presidential election outcome this year.
That is referencing one thing and one thing only: Were they able to successfully hack into election infrastructure and change results. Answer? No, they were not. This is also… not new. Multiple other investigations found the same thing: that, for all its faults (and it has faults!), the US voting infrastructure held up nicely in 2016 (and in 2020). That doesn’t mean Russia didn’t try to hack into these things. There are plenty of reports detailing how they succeeded in targeting state and local election officials as well as voting tech companies. But no evidence that any of that resulted in changed votes.
And that’s all this “bombshell” is really saying: that there was no evidence of the election infrastructure failing. Trump won in 2016 not because someone hacked voting machines. That’s it.
Here’s where the deliberate disinformation kicks in. Gabbard and the MAGA crew are claiming this proves Russia did absolutely nothing to influence the election, and that Obama cooked up a fake story between December 2016 and January 2017. On top of that, she claims this is so egregious that she’s referring Obama and his team for possible prosecution.
This is spectacularly stupid for multiple reasons. The original report was narrowly focused on one thing that was widely known: no successful hack impacted the actual election. But it’s being used to pretend it proves that the Russians didn’t try to influence the election at all—a thing we already knew they absolutely did, as confirmed by multiple investigative reports, including the Republican-led Senate reports quoted above.
The second part of the nonsense is that Gabbard then misrepresents Obama’s request to the intelligence agency, following that initial assessment, to write an analysis about Russian attempts to influence the election as a whole. That is, having seen the narrow report about a lack of success in hacking in to change votes, the request was a broader look at the many ways which Russia simply tried to influence the election, which is something entirely different than hacking voting infrastructure.
These two things are not in conflict at all, but Gabbard presents them as though they are. It’s like saying a doctor’s report that “no broken bones detected” contradicts a later assessment about “possible muscle strain”—when they’re examining completely different types of injuries. Even worse, Gabbard and MAGA world’s freakout is like saying the doctor who said “no broken bones, but can we run an analysis of muscle strain” was thereby trying to cover up the lack of broken bones by asking for a report on the muscle strain. It’s stupid beyond belief.
This is the Twitter Files playbook all over again.
- Take some internal docs and release them, but surrounded by a bunch of innuendo and exaggerated claims.
- Hand those documents to very stupid or very motivated (or both!) people who will falsely claim that the limited statement in those docs means the much broader thing that is in the innuendo.
- Voila! A wholly manufactured story.
And into the void leaps one of the same useful idiots: Matt Taibbi. On the same day that walking First Amendment violator Donald Trump was directly trying to silence negative stories about himself, Matt Taibbi was claiming that Gabbard’s release was the biggest story in ages, and way more of a scandal than literally anything Donald Trump has done.
That’s Taibbi (who regularly makes embarrassingly stupid mistakes) claiming that the “corruption” here “dwarfs the worst Trump scandals.” He further claims “It’s unprecedented. It’s now in writing that the whole Trump-Russia thing was invented.”
Except, to anyone who can actually comprehend what words mean, this is not true at all. It confirms two things we knew already: (1) Russia was unsuccessful in its attempts to literally hack the voting machines used in the election, and (2) Russia still very much sought to influence the election.
This is the same sort of shit they did with the Twitter Files, which revealed the kinds of challenging internal debates over how to operationalize trust & safety policies on edge cases, which Taibbi falsely turned into a giant scandal he still doesn’t understand to this day (because there was literally nothing scandalous in it).
But, of course, the Trump-supporting media (as they did with the Twitter files) is running with the innuendo. Fox News is claiming this is proof that “Obama and cronies created the Trump-Russia hoax.”
Breitbart is calling it a “treasonous” plot to “frame Trump” and says it “makes Watergate look like amateur hour.”
This hysterical reaction is based on completely misrepresenting what the documents say. Obama wasn’t told there were no Russian interference attempts. He was told they didn’t successfully hack voting machines. That’s it.
And the research assessment that came a month later wasn’t in conflict with that. It noted (correctly as confirmed multiple times since) that the Russians absolutely tried to influence the election, which is not the same thing as hacking voting machines.
All that other stuff, including their desire to impact the election, their use of social media to do so, their connections to people in Trump’s orbit, and even their attempts at hacking voting systems, has all been confirmed. It’s not something that Obama had them make up. Even the CIA’s attempt to lower its own confidence on Putin’s intent earlier this month didn’t disagree with the fact that he did seek to interfere, even if he wasn’t that successful.
And, of course, thanks to Trump v. the United States, even if Obama had done something wrong here (and he clearly did not), Donald Trump’s Supreme Court made it clear that the President is immune for official acts, of which asking the intel community for an assessment is assuredly exactly that.
Unfortunately, even the mainstream media is reflecting Gabbard’s false framing, talking about how she called for Obama to be prosecuted over this, and burying the fact that it’s based on a deliberate misreading of what the documents show.
Meanwhile, Taibbi (who still isn’t criticizing Trump for his myriad attacks on press freedom) is literally claiming that Obama could end up in prison for this thing that the documents in front of him don’t show, no matter how often Taibbi claims otherwise (and apparently, Taibbi also seems wholly unaware of Trump v. US).
The irony here is staggering. While Trump is actively threatening journalists and media companies—behavior Taibbi’s crowd used to call authoritarian—Taibbi is fantasizing about imprisoning Obama over documents that any idiot can see don’t support his claims.
This is the Twitter Files playbook all over again and it’s designed to create exactly this kind of confusion. Gabbard knew that releasing these narrow technical documents with inflammatory framing would generate exactly the headlines we’re seeing. The goal isn’t truth—it’s providing Trump with a distraction from the Epstein stories and giving his base a new grievance narrative to obsess over.
For years going forward, due to useful idiots like Matt Taibbi, we’ll be hearing nonsense from otherwise smart people believing that it was revealed that Obama had the intelligence community come up with a fake report that the Russians tried to help Trump.
Which he did not—and it’s something we need to be clear about.
All of the evidence shows that Russia absolutely sought to sow discord, including helping Donald Trump in 2016. It was almost certainly less successful than many people believed, and it was clearly unsuccessful in actually changing votes in the infrastructure.
But President Obama being accurately told two separate things in two consecutive months—(1) that the Russians didn’t succeed in hacking votes and (2) that they did want to influence the election through any means they could find—does not, in any way, suggest that Obama cooked up evidence of the latter.
Filed Under: barack obama, cia, donald trump, elections, matt taibbi, russia, russiagate, tulsi gabbard, twitter files