Last week, the Trump administration made its latest and most comically desperate attempt to distract from the Jeffrey Epstein scandal, when Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard claimed that she had unearthed bombshell proof of a Barack Obama–era plot to invent the conclusion that Russia had intervened in the 2016 election to help Donald Trump. Soon after, Trump’s Truth Social account circulated an AI video depicting Obama being led off to prison. The message to his followers was that this scandal, not the other scandal involving a certain wealthy sex offender, was the one to focus on.
This message contains multiple levels of dishonesty. On the surface, the effort to draw attention away from Epstein is glaring. Below that lies the wild claim that Obama or his top officials might somehow be charged with crimes. And the fantasy of prosecutions rests on yet another ludicrous claim: that Russia did not attempt to help Trump win in 2016. The president has managed to open a debate over whether the intelligence community’s conclusion that Russia helped Trump was a crime, when in reality it was not even a mistake.
Last Wednesday, Gabbard claimed that she’d found “irrefutable evidence” that Obama and his aides had concocted a “contrived narrative that Russia interfered in the 2016 election to help President Trump win.” Trump has insisted for nine years that Russia did not intervene on his behalf, and through sheer force of repetition has turned this into something close to official Republican Party dogma.
The Obama administration and the CIA adamantly deny any political motive behind their conclusion that Russia was trying to help Trump win. “We definitely had the intel to show with high probability that the specific goal of the Russians was to get Trump elected,” Susan Miller, who helped lead the CIA’s analysis at the time, recently told NBC.
Of course, if you think Obama and the CIA were secretly plotting to besmirch Trump’s election victory, you probably don’t put much stock in their denials. But the Senate Intelligence Committee similarly concluded in 2020 that Russia’s goal was, as the panel’s bipartisan report put it, “to damage the Clinton Campaign and tarnish what it expected might be a Clinton presidential administration, help the Trump Campaign after Trump became the presumptive Republican nominee, and generally undermine the U.S. democratic process.” Trump has not explained how a “contrived” analysis could have won the endorsement of all eight Republican committee members, including Marco Rubio, Trump’s current secretary of state.
The committee based this conclusion on “a variety of information, including raw intelligence reporting.” (Subsequent reporting revealed that the United States had a high-level human source close to the Kremlin.) But the conclusion that Russia tried to help Trump doesn’t have to rely on the authority of the bipartisan committee that investigated the question, or on the still-confidential intelligence that helped support the conclusion. It’s obvious from the public fact pattern.
In 2016, Russian television—as well as RT, the network Russia uses to propagandize abroad—was relentlessly propagandizing on Trump’s behalf. Discerning which candidate Moscow favored in the race is about as hard as guessing which candidate the owner of Fox News supports.
Russia’s efforts to influence the 2016 election included using trolls and bots to seed social-media messages attacking Hillary Clinton and praising Trump. The content reflected the same themes Putin was pushing in his overt propaganda. Far more consequential was an operation to steal and disseminate Democratic Party emails, thousands of which were released in the immediate aftermath of an embarrassing recording of Trump boasting about sexually assaulting women. Russia wasn’t trying to make the American political system look bad; it was trying to make Clinton look bad and Trump look good.
Putin’s Russia has a long-standing habit of intervening in foreign elections to bolster nationalist candidates who criticize Western alliances. Frequently, those interventions involve covert payments to the parties or their candidates. Not least because prominent Trump operatives refused to cooperate, the Robert Mueller investigation never definitively established the extent to which the Trump campaign worked with Russia. But even the known elements closely track with the pattern of how Russia behaves when it is trying to help a friendly candidate win.
Trump’s strategy of promiscuous dissembling often allows his smaller lies to be injected into the country’s political bloodstream as his more extravagant lies draw attention. In this case, his main intention is to change the subject from Epstein to literally anything else. That he is simultaneously managing to inscribe his revisionist history of the 2016 election into the public record is a secondary victory Trump does not deserve.
