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National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard said Sunday she will turn over evidence to the Department of Justice for criminal referrals after releasing information that she says shows top Obama administration officials conspired against Donald Trump in 2016.
Ms. Gabbard says the Obama administration manufactured a bogus intelligence report about Russian interference a month after the 2016 election and that officials must be held accountable for using it to try to undermine the Trump administration.
“We are referring all of the documents that we have uncovered to the Department of Justice and the FBI for a criminal referral,” Ms. Gabbard said on “Fox Sunday Morning Futures.” “We are going to provide everything that we have, everything that we will continue to gather, to the Department of Justice for that direct intent, and that direct purpose.”
“There must be indictments,” she said. “Those responsible, no matter how powerful they are and were at that time, no matter who was involved in creating this treasonous conspiracy against the American people, they all must be held accountable.”
Ms. Gabbard said the report manufactured by Obama officials ran contrary to the intelligence community’s general assessment that Russia was not attempting to influence and was not capable of influencing the election.
Democrats have condemned the allegations.
Rep. Jim Himes of Connecticut, ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said Ms. Gabbard is “rehashing decade-old false claims about the Obama administration.”
“Few episodes in our nation’s history have been investigated as thoroughly as the Intelligence Community’s warning in 2016 that Russia was interfering in the election,” Mr. Himes said last week. “Baseless accusations of treason are unfortunately par for the course for this director of national intelligence, but that doesn’t make them any less damaging and unacceptable.”
Mr. Himes added that intelligence community leaders in 2016 “understood that they took an oath to the Constitution, not President Trump.”
“I wish Director Gabbard could say the same,” he said.
Mr. Trump has long derided the idea that Russia interfered in the 2016 election on his behalf against his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton. He has called the idea a “hoax” and a product of a nefarious “deep state” that was trying to thwart him.
Others say reviews of the 2016 election tell a different story, including a Republican-led Senate investigation in 2020 that said the “committee found no reason to dispute the intelligence community’s conclusions.”
In a memo released Friday, Ms. Gabbard said the information “clearly shows there was a treasonous conspiracy in 2016 committed by officials at the highest level of our government.”
“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,” she said.
The report proved to be the foundation for a smear campaign against Mr. Trump, as well as the Mueller investigation and two congressional impeachments, she said.
The memo mentioned former National Intelligence Director James Clapper, former CIA Director John Brenna and former FBI Director James Comey.
“Every person involved in this conspiracy must be investigated and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, to ensure nothing like this ever happens again,” Ms. Gabbard wrote Friday.
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