Tulsi Gabbard ignored CIA objections to declassified documents

National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard declassified a Republican House Intelligence Committee report on Russia’s interference in the 2016 election despite objections from CIA officials who warned that sensitive sources and methods could be compromised. Knewz.com has learned that the document, five years old but containing detailed references to Russian actors, surveillance practices and human intelligence sources, was released with relatively few redactions.

CIA defends release of document

The CIA defended the decision, noting that agency director John Ratcliffe backed the public release. “This effort reflects Director Ratcliffe’s continued commitment to elevating the truth and bringing transparency to the American people,” a CIA spokesperson said in a statement. However, Senate Intelligence Committee Vice Chairman Mark Warner, a Virginia Democrat, cautioned that the release could harm ongoing intelligence efforts. Gabbard’s office did not respond to requests for comment. At a July 23 White House briefing, Gabbard argued the report proved that the Obama administration fabricated intelligence about Russia’s efforts to aid Trump in the 2016 election, an accusation that former President Barack Obama and his officials have rejected as baseless.

Intelligence veterans raise alarm regarding the level of detail exposed

Some intelligence veterans expressed alarm at the level of detail exposed. Michael van Landingham, a former CIA analyst who worked on the 2017 intelligence community assessment, said the disclosures could jeopardize intelligence collection. “I was shocked to see the declassification detailing the dates the US IC [intelligence community] gathered material, naming specific Russian actors and quoting at length from both raw and serialized intelligence reports of Russian leadership discussions. … This sort of information would allow for Russian authorities to easily find potential sources of the leaks, which would complicate the job of the US IC keeping America safe,” Landingham said in a statement. Larry Pfeiffer, a former senior official at the CIA and NSA, echoed the concern, describing the redactions as minimal. “When our intelligence community leaders conduct end-runs around procedures established to protect sources and methods, they put at grave risk foreign sources risking life and limb to give us information vital to our security,” he said.

Claims of a plot by the Obama administration

The controversy unfolded alongside other moves by the Trump administration to revisit the handling of Russia’s election interference. On July 2, Ratcliffe declassified an internal CIA review of the 2017 assessment, which used more cautious language and avoided specifics about intelligence sources. Recently, Attorney General Pam Bondi ordered prosecutors to convene a grand jury to investigate the Obama administration’s review of Russia’s 2016 actions. A senior former Justice Department official dismissed the move as “a dangerous political stunt,” while Democrats argued it was intended to distract from the Trump administration’s failure to release files related to the late financier Jeffrey Epstein.

The bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee report from 2020

A bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee report in 2020 confirmed the U.S. intelligence community’s assessment that the Kremlin interfered in the 2016 election to help Donald Trump win. However, Special Counsel John Durham, appointed during Trump’s first term, found no evidence that Hillary Clinton’s campaign or officials in the Obama administration engaged in a criminal conspiracy to damage Trump through false claims. At a joint news conference with Trump in Helsinki in 2018, Putin said he had wanted Trump to win the election.

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