President Donald Trump's intelligence chiefs are conducting a systematic campaign to rewrite the history of the 2016 election, seeking to reversean eight-year-old assessmentthat Russia waged an information war to boost Trump's candidacy. National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard and CIA Director John Ratcliffe have cited declassified emails to allege in social media posts and television appearances that Obama administration officials manipulated intelligence and conspired to undermine the legitimacy of Trump's electoral victory in 2016. But a bipartisan Senate investigation in 2020 and a recent CIA review both found that Russia interfered in the 2016 election, launching a disinformation campaign designed to damage Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton's candidacy. A three-year investigation by special counsel John Durham reported no criminal conspiracy by Obama administration officials to sabotage Trump, and Durham filed no charges against CIA officials. On Monday,Fox News reportedthat Gabbard's office made a criminal referral to the Justice Department related to the 2017 intelligence assessment of Russia's role in the 2016 election, without specifying the nature of the referral. In an apparent reference to the report, Trump posted a fake artificial intelligence-generated video online of former President Barack Obama being led out of the Oval Office by police. NBC News could not verify that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence had filed a criminal referral. The Justice Department and the National Intelligence Director's Office did not respond to requests for comment. The allegations from Trump's intelligence chiefs come when Trump faces demands from many of his supporters to release files linked to financier Jeffrey Epstein. Democratic lawmakers accused the administration of seeking to distract from the Epstein case and to "rewrite" history for partisan purposes. Democratic Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, vice chair of the Intelligence Committee, said the panel's unanimous, bipartisan conclusion in 2020 was that Russia interfered in the 2016 election to benefit Trump. "This is just another example of the DNI trying to cook the books, rewrite history, and erode trust in the intelligence agencies she's supposed to be leading," Warner said in a statement, referring to Gabbard. On Friday, Gabbard alleged that declassified emails released by her office revealed a "treasonous conspiracy" by Obama administration officials to play up Russia's actions during the 2016 election to undermine Trump's authority as president. "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," Gabbard said in a statement. She added that "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." Gabbard was referring to a U.S. intelligence assessment in early 2017 that Russia had tried to skew the outcome of the election in favor of Trump. Russia orchestrated a leak of stolen emails from the Democratic National Committee and created fake social media accounts. The 2020 Senate committee investigation, which interviewed more than 200 witnesses and reviewed a million documents over three years, came to the same conclusion. Trump's secretary of state, Marco Rubio,signed off on the committee's findingsat the time, when he was acting chair of the Intelligence Committee. The committee found no evidence of "collusion" between the Trump campaign and Russia, Rubio said in a statement after the report was released. But he added: "What the Committee did find however is very troubling. We found irrefutable evidence of Russian meddling." Trump has always bristled at the idea that Russia interfered in the election on his behalf and has accused intelligence and FBI officials of plotting against him. Ratcliffe, the CIA director, released aninternal agency reviewof the 2017 intelligence assessment of the 2016 election this month. The review found that some standard procedures were not followed, with analysts having been given an unusually short time to produce their report. But the review did not refute the findings of the intelligence assessment that Russia sought to interfere in the election. Ratcliffe, however,argued on social mediathat the review showed that Democratic appointees "manipulated intelligence and silenced career professionals — all to get Trump." Both the intelligence agency assessment and the Senate investigation found that Russia hacked into voting systems in some states but did not try to change votes or alter ballot counting. Gabbard's office said that in December 2016, talking points were prepared for the national intelligence director at the time, James Clapper, stating: "Foreign adversaries did not use cyberattacks on election infrastructure to alter the US Presidential election outcome." The National Intelligence Director's Office suggested that intelligence about cyberattacks was later contradicted in a new finding. The intelligence agencies concluded in their assessment that Russian President Vladimir Putin "aspired" to help Trump's election chances, the ODNI noted. Democrats in Congress said Gabbard was conflating two separate issues: whether Russia sought to tamper with voting or whether Moscow tried to influence the election through disinformation and leaked emails stolen from the Democratic Party. The Obama administration never said Russia had tried to alter votes through its cyber intrusions. Rep. Jim Himes of Connecticut, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said Gabbard's allegations of treason were "baseless" and an attempt to revive conspiracy claims that had already been debunked. Gabbard is "rehashing decade-old false claims about the Obama Administration," Himes said in a statement Friday. "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. " Larry Pfeiffer, a former senior intelligence official who served both Republican and Democratic presidents over more than three decades, said Gabbard's "analysis is grossly flawed and inconsistent with the findings of years-long investigations by the Department of Justice and the U.S. Senate." He added that Gabbard's partisan political behavior as director would be likely cause her to lose the trust of rank-and-file members of the country's spy agencies. The senior CIA officer who helped oversee the 2017 intelligence assessment of Russia's role in the 2016 election, Susan Miller, rejected the CIA director's portrayal of the analysis, though she objected to an annex that was added to the report. Miller said she was angry at the time that senior officials chose to include an annex to the intelligence assessment referring to an unverified dossier about Trump compiled by a former British intelligence officer, Christopher Steele. But Miller said she agreed with the assessment's core finding that Putin tried to aid Trump in 2016, and she accused Ratcliffe, the CIA's current director, of engaging in partisan politics. "He's doing Trump's bidding to go after those of us who dared to write a report that simply said the Russians tried to influence the election towards Trump," Millertold the investigative newsletter SpyTalk. "And that's a crime?"
