Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has been busy lately, and she's receiving plenty of media coverage as a result: Her new Russiagate disclosures shed light on shady behavior from intelligence officials in the final days of Barack Obama's presidency, which had the effect of casting some doubt on the legitimacy of Donald Trump's 2016 victory. The details are a bit complicated, but essentially, national security experts knew that Russia had not hacked U.S. voting machines, and thus the impact of Russian interference on the 2016 result was negligible. Obama was not entirely satisfied with this conclusion and told them to take another crack at it. Shortly thereafter, news stories in the mainstream media began to allege sinister Russian involvement in the election outcome, sourced to anonymous intelligence officials.
Over time, these anonymously sourced and often unspecific claims about direct Russian interference mutated into the social media influence conspiracy, which held that Russian bots and accounts on Facebook had swung the election to Trump. This theory was enthusiastically embraced by intelligence officials and gullible mainstream media reporters; it too eventually died, once the limited scope of the social media influence became clearer.
More transparency around this subject—which generates wall-to-wall coverage in conservative media—is certainly welcome. Gabbard's efforts to further unmask efforts by federal bureaucrats to redact intelligence relating to COVID-19's origins is also welcome. I interviewed The Daily Caller's Emily Kopp about this today on Rising.
