Donald Trump’s allies are promising to finally pull back the curtain on Russiagate, a narrative they claim was engineered by Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and their intelligence allies. Former Congresswoman and now Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has taken center stage, waving around documents she claims expose treason at the highest levels of government. But for all the noise, her case raises more red flags than revelations—and may serve more as a diversion than a reckoning.
The documents Gabbard cites do show that the Obama administration pressured intelligence agencies to assert Russian interference in the 2016 election, even as early assessments found no evidence of vote tampering. The House Intelligence Committee’s findings in 2017 and again in 2020 also chipped away at the Intelligence Community Assessment’s claim that Vladimir Putin “favored” Trump. Still, Gabbard’s memo oddly affirms a central pillar of the Russiagate narrative—that the Russian government directed the hack of the Democratic National Committee. This contradiction casts doubt on her motives. Despite years of Russian denials and growing skepticism from independent experts, Gabbard clings to the premise that there was a hack at all.
The problem is, even that core event—the so-called DNC hack—has never been forensically proven. Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), a group of former CIA, FBI, and NSA analysts, concluded in 2017 that the data transfer speeds indicated an internal leak, not an external hack. This aligns with long-standing questions about the integrity of the evidence. In April 2016, the DNC noticed digital “anomalies” and turned not to law enforcement, but to Clinton-connected attorney Michael Sussmann, who hired CrowdStrike. The FBI never physically examined the DNC servers. When pressed, CrowdStrike admitted they had no concrete proof that data had been exfiltrated by Russian actors. In fact, their president publicly acknowledged in 2017 that there was no hard evidence of a data theft at all.
By 2019, VIPS again questioned why no forensic evidence had ever been presented. Meanwhile, Special Counsel John Durham revealed in 2021 that Sussmann fed the FBI fabricated links between Trump and a Russian bank—raising new questions about whether the DNC “hack” story was similarly contrived. And still unanswered is perhaps the most critical question: who actually gave the DNC files to WikiLeaks?
Some point to Seth Rich, a DNC staffer mysteriously murdered in July 2016. Others suggest WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange holds the key, if he’s ever allowed to testify. Yet Gabbard’s memo steers clear of both. She makes no mention of VIPS, sidesteps the CrowdStrike admissions, ignores Seth Rich entirely, and says nothing about Assange. Her selective outrage and glaring omissions suggest that this campaign may be less about exposing the truth—and more about steering public attention away from scandals Trump’s camp would rather not revisit, particularly his ties to the Jeffrey Epstein saga.
