THE DEEPER DIVE: Going Deep into the Epstein Files v. the Gabbard Files
Who weaponized the DoJ and the intelligence community at a level matching "Deep Throat's" revelations about President Nixon?
President Trump needed a distraction after days of bashing his own supporters for believing in what he is calling a Democrat Epstein hoax. His need may have been met this week by his Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, who released her office’s report on Russia, which she said proves the Obama Administration manufactured and weaponized a fake Russian scandal against President Trump just ahead of Trump’s first term in an attempt to delegitimize his presidency.
OK, I thought, We’re finally going to actually see how deep-state the Russian collusion hoax promulgated by the press for the first three year’s of Trump’s term went.
What I found, instead, was shocking.
A tawdry tale
The timing of Gabbard’s report on Friday could not have been more pleasing to the president, given its release just as the Wall Street Journal published its own sexy story, which it had teased for publication all day Thursday. That overblown story turned out to say that Donald Trump, many years ago, wrote a personal note to Jeffrey Epstein as part of the fiftieth birthday party celebration for Trump’s fellow womanizer that included a bawdy, hand-drawn image of a naked woman, signed over the part of her anatomy where the Donald infamously said he would grab her, with a comment saying, “May every day be another wonderful secret.”
Naturally, the tale leaves everyone wondering today just what kind of “wonderful secrets” the note was referring to.
That was the Journal’s sole breakout story about Trump. Trump immediately denied that the twenty-year-old salacious drawing is his artwork or his handwriting, and he is already suing Rupert Murdoch for what he says is a fake-news story, published by Murdoch’s “filthy rag.” The Journal’s release of the letter’s content even provoked Trump into asking Pam Bondi to petition the court that was handling the Jeffrey Epstein trial, prior to his death, to unseal all grand-jury testimony related to the case that was being made against Epstein.
His alibi: “I don’t draw pictures,” he wrote on Truth Social.
But a review of the president’s past reveals that, for years, Mr. Trump was a high-profile doodler — or at least suggested he was. In the early 2000s, he regularly donated drawings to charities in New York. The drawings, many of which appear to be done with a thick, black-marker and prominently feature his signature are not dissimilar to how The Journal describes the birthday note he sent Mr. Epstein.
“It takes me a few minutes to draw something, in my case, it’s usually a building or a cityscape of skyscrapers, and then sign my name, but it raises thousands of dollars to help the hungry in New York through the Capuchin Food Pantries Ministry,” he wrote in his 2008 book….
After Mr. Trump was elected president, some of the drawings he signed were auctioned off for thousands of dollars — even as he wrote in his book that “art may not be my strong point.”
The president has denied reports before — only for them to later be confirmed by audio or photos, such as his comments captured on “Access Hollywood” in which he bragged about grabbing women’s genitals, or photos of him flushing documents down the toilet.
Of course, no one ever said Trump is a good artist—just a sketch artist (and maybe a sketchy artist at that):
For a guy who protests too much that he doesn’t draw pictures, he does like to draw with markers … and sign with them, as The Journal described, and he has raised a lot of money with them just because his name is on them:
Maybe he did a nice little birthday piece of memorabilia for Epstein, too—one that you could now sell for millions, given the rich context. It sounds like Trump and the WSJ will have plenty of time to analyze the signature and the drawing techniques to see how much it looks like one of Trump’s masterpieces as well as to chase down any chain of custody that would take its origination back to Trump. That will now become the WSJ’s case to prove that it did its due diligence.
A sudden change of face or just two-faced?
Suddenly—now that the WSJ published its tantalizing tale of hinted secrets and nude drawings—Trump wants all grand-jury testimony out in the open. That is surprising, so quickly as the order came after he and his DoJ head, Pam Bondi, said everything in the Epstein Files would remain closed because there is nothing of interest there. Even more interesting is Bondi’s sudden concern for why the court’s concealment of the Epstein Files should now be uncovered:
'This Court should conclude that the Epstein and Maxwell cases qualify as a matter of public interest, release the associated grand jury transcripts, and lift any preexisting protective orders,' wrote Bondi and Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche in the Friday evening filings.
There are a lot of us who do think that all of the Epstein Files, not just the parts that were talked about in grand-jury testimony, are “a matter of public interest.” Why Trump is willing to expose all grand-jury testimony now on the basis that it “is a matter of public interest” but not release all the rest of the Epstein Files the government has, along with a simple listing of Epstein’s clients, is unclear.
Trump enjoined her:
'Based on the ridiculous amount of publicity given to Jeffrey Epstein, I have asked Attorney General Pam Bondi to produce any and all pertinent Grand Jury testimony, subject to Court approval,' he wrote on his Truth Social account….
The grand jury information is only a part of the evidence that makes up the so-called Epstein files.
Truthful tale or not, I guess we can be thankful the WSJ has knocked a piece of that info loose. Well, almost loosened it up, as you’ll now see:
Grand Jury testimony is often sealed for the sake of protecting witnesses—like the girls Team Trump said they want to protect by withholding all their evidence in the Epstein Files; but for some reason the details already sealed by the courts should now all be publicly revealed. Is it more important to shield big names in the broader Epstein Files than to provide protection for actual witnesses to crimes with underage girls who were going to divulge their hidden truths in a court case?
It is understood the letter [to Epstein, bearing Trump’s signature] forms part of the initial investigation into Epstein and Maxwell that the Justice Department conducted years ago, however it is unclear whether it was examined during Attorney General Pam Bondi's recent search.
Here’s the catch. It may be better for Trump to ask the court to free up the grand-jury documents, rather than to immediately release all the files the government holds by executive order, because a petition to the court for release could take years to come:
What it really means is that Americans may have to wait months or even years to get more answers – if they get them at all.
The unsealing of grand jury testimony presents a lot of obstacles and is perhaps one of the more difficult pieces of information to unseal in a case considering stringent secrecy rules that many courts are hesitant to lift.
In other words, it might be a safe ask. The court is likely to say “no.” In the very least, it will take a long time and a legal battle to get the court to “yes,” and Trump may not even make the requisite effort to make that happen … even though he holds a whole lot more info in the government files that is not sealed as part of the case, which he could just release directly.
If it’s classified, we already know Trump could immediately declassify it by just shipping it all to his secure government-file storage facility in the janitor’s closet and guest bathroom at Mar-a-Lago. That kind of shipment, he has already told the entire nation, constitutes immediate declassification, even if he doesn’t expressly order the declassification. He’s already said his whole staff knows that.
Speaker of the House Mike Johnson now agrees that it’s time to disclose all the government files on Epstein to the public for total transparency, but Trump has not yet gone along with that; and the Trump government so far has refused to even create its own list of Epstein clients based on the hoard of documentation it has.
Trump claimed Tucker 'did not want to hear' from White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt that the 'letter was a FAKE.'
'Instead, they are going with a false, malicious, and defamatory story anyway. President Trump will be suing The Wall Street Journal, NewsCorp, and Mr. Murdoch, shortly.
Bondi filed the motion to release grand-jury testimony on Friday.
Suddenly, the Gabbard Files
Filed on the same day as Attorney General Bondi’s Department of Justice request to the court, came another filing to the Department of Justice by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, which was also disseminated publicly for total transparency. Gabbard requested on Friday that the DoJ pursue criminal trials against those in the Obama Administration who weaponized the intelligence community back in 2016 against Trump.
As we all well remember, the leftovers from Obama’s DOJ tied the new Trump administration in knots for most of his first term with claims propagated to the media of Trump’s collusion with Russia, now known as the “Russian Hoax”:
She's now calling for an investigation into and potential criminal prosecution of anyone who took part – which may include ex-President Barack Obama and James Comey, the former FBI director.
Gabbard’s report, included in the links below, claims right at the top to present “New Evidence of Obama Administration Conspiracy to Subvert President Trump’s 2016 Victory and Presidency.” The evidence, Gabbard writes, is “overwhelming,” and the full documentation she handed over to support her claims is publicly available along with her revealing of everything those documents contain in her own report.
Here are the bullet points in her report (italics mine; boldface hers):
In the months leading up to the November 2016 election, the Intelligence Community (IC) consistently assessed that Russia is “probably not trying … to influence the election by using cyber means.”
On December 7, 2016, after the election, talking points were prepared for DNI James Clapper stating, “Foreign adversaries did not use cyberattacks on election infrastructure to alter the US Presidential election outcome.”
On December 9, 2016, President Obama’s White House gathered top National Security Council Principals for a meeting that included James Clapper, John Brennan, Susan Rice, John Kerry, Loretta Lynch, Andrew McCabe and others, to discuss Russia.
After the meeting, DNI Clapper’s Executive Assistant sent an email to IC leaders tasking them with creating a new IC assessment “per the President’s request” that details the “tools Moscow used and actions it took to influence the 2016 election….”
Obama officials leaked false statements to media outlets, including The Washington Post, claiming, “Russia has attempted through cyber means to interfere in, if not actively influence, the outcome of an election.”
On January 6, 2017, a new Intelligence Community Assessment was released that directly contradicted the IC assessments that were made throughout the previous six months.
After months of investigation into this matter, the facts reveal this new assessment was based on information that was known by those involved to be manufactured i.e. the Steele Dossier or deemed as not credible. This was politicized intelligence that was used as the basis for countless smears seeking to delegitimize President Trump’s victory, the years-long Mueller investigation, two Congressional impeachments, high level officials being investigated, arrested, and thrown in jail, heightened US-Russia tensions, and more….
The issue I am raising is not a partisan issue. It is one that concerns every American. The information we are releasing today 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….
Their egregious abuse of power and blatant rejection of our Constitution threatens the very foundation and integrity of our democratic republic. No matter how powerful, 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. The American people’s faith and trust in our democratic republic and therefore the future of our nation depends on it. As such, I am providing all documents to the Department of Justice to deliver the accountability that President Trump, his family, and the American people deserve
Gabbard’s direct report on the evidence could hardly be more emphatic. If her documentation proved what she said it proved, this would be nation-changing. She provides over a hundred pages of emails, memos, etc. to prove the Obama government migrated from consistent intel reports that said Russia was not involved in any kind of cyber action against the US election to resorting to the worst evidence (the fake Steele Dossier) after Trump was elected to pin Russian interference on Trump. This, she says Team Obama did to strike a bloodless coup against Trump’s impending presidency. (Email address/contact info, possibly some names, are redacted, but most of the content is complete.)
My deeper dive into the documents
I decided I needed to take the weekend to do a really deep dive into these documents … to read through them to see how condemning the evidence was for the people, including President Obama, James Clapper, John Brennan, and Susan Rice whom Gabbard now says should be tried for “treasonous conspiracy,” a crime potentially punishable by death.
It’s a huge charge, but is the evidence really there to back her bold claims?
I want you to note the italics I’ve added to what the initial assessment actually states (boldface is theirs), since Gabbard’s argument starts from the premise that “the Intelligence Community (IC) consistently assessed that Russia is ‘probably not trying … to influence the election by using cyber means’” at first to switch later on to claiming it was. She puts that in quotes as if the documents say those exact words, but she omits a critical part of that sentence right from the start. I want you to notice where her accusation cuts the quote off, compared to what the documents actually say, because, Wow! did she omit something important in her summary claim about the evidence in order to set it up to support her claim that the Obama intel team changed messages as it became obvious that Hillary was losing and Trump winning, but especially after he won. Here’s the evidence. Notice particularly the first and last lines:
There is no indication of a Russian threat to directly manipulate the actual vote count through cyber means. However, as seen in recent media reporting, any cyber activity directed against the election infrastructure is likely to have an effect on public confidence - even if the cyber operation is unsuccessful or not intended to impact the election (e.g. theft of PII from a voter registration database). (J: POTUS agreed yesterday that our electoral apparatus ((my term)) should be considered as critical infrastructure. I have directed my folks to generate an NIE on attendant cyber threats to this key infrastructure, and to get it done sooner than later….
Russia probably is not (and will not) trying to influence the election by using cyber means to manipulate computer-enabled election infrastructure.
Compare her summary statement of their claim:
Gabbard again: “Russia is ‘probably not trying … to influence the election by using cyber means.’”
The documents: “Russia probably is not (and will not) trying to influence the election by using cyber means to manipulate computer-enabled election infrastructure.”
There was only one specific way in which Russia was not using cyber means against the election. In fact, the IC documents she provides to support her summary consistently state from start to finish that Russia was trying very hard all along to influence the election via cyber means, BUT that there was no evidence it used cyber means to change the vote count.
What the documents actually say again and again, right from the start, is that the US intel community could find, throughout the campaign year almost no evidence that Russia hacked any voting equipment, which they call “election infrastructure” to change the actual votes. Not during any of the primaries across the nation or the final election. Gabbard omitted “the actual vote count” and the “to manipulate the computer-enabled election infrastructure,” but that narrower phrasing is used every time the documents say Russia did NOT do something. It did not change the actual votes.
That is a major misrepresentation on her part. When you look at the totality of her summary and the totality of the documents, you will see she consistently cuts off those nuances. What the Obama administration found, again and again, in the documents Gabbard provides, is that Russia tried very hard via cyber means to influence the election, as I’ll lay out below, but did not ever try to directly alter people’s marked votes or the tallies of those marked votes. That message never changed.
They found no signs of significant tampering with US voting equipment, even though they judged …
Russia to be the only nation state with the current means and possible motivation to use cyber attack to disrupt the 2016 election or deny political legitimacy to US presidential candidates….
We agree with: Russia probably is not (and will not) trying to influence the election by using cyber means to manipulate computer-enabled election infrastructure. While Russia has some capability to conduct cyber manipulation of election infrastructure, we judge that efforts by them (or others) to change the outcome of an election through cyber means would be detected. That's a key element of our cyber-focused PDB. We assess that foreign adversaries, notably Russia, are more likely to focus their cyber operations on undermining credibility/public confidence. That assessment feeds directly into the influence operations, some cyber-enabled, that we've seen related to current and historic election cycles. We concur with CIA's change related to that.
The intel community found that US election equipment was open to some hacking but that such hacking would probably have been detected and be traceable, which they surmise is why Russia decided not to deploy those methods to change the outcome. In fact, to the idea of influence versus direct manipulation of electronic election results, one person responded,
… I sort of understood the emphasis to be on Russia probably not having the capability to influence the election…. I suggest a tweak to the second sentence.
That person appeared to want to correct the potential misreading that saying Russia did not try to influence the election could have and make it clear that they did not try to change the actual vote because they certainly did try to influence it. And another email contained that same line and further stated,
Russia probably is not trying to going to be able to? influence the election by using cyber means to manipulate computer-enabled election infrastructure. Russia probably is using cyber means primarily to influence the election by stealing campaign party data and leaking select items, and it is also using public propaganda. This fits an historical pattern of Russia using less sophisticated propaganda and information operations to influence US elections.
That clarifies the statement that Gabbard cuts off. The full context is that Russia probably IS USING CYBER MEANS to INFLUENCE THE ELECTION, but it is restricting itself to doing it by stealing emails (such as Hillary’s) and party data and disseminating all of that wherever it will cause disruption in American as well as creating its own propaganda and disseminating that via electronic means.
In fact, you’ll find the documents from the Obama days, consistently show the IC told the president (and each other) that they did not believe Russia could or would manipulate election infrastructure (voting machines and counting machines) but that they were already involved in manipulating the election through hacking emails and sharing party data and electronic propaganda on social media. All of this they reported even when it looked like Hillary was winning.
The most likely cyber threat to the election is from low-level, detectable, cyber intrusions and attacks that cause localized disruption but do not threaten the overall functionality of the election services or infrastructures. Nonetheless, even the perception that such low-level intrusions and attacks have occurred risks undermining public confidence in the legitimacy of the electoral process, the validity of the election’s outcome, and the mandate of the winning candidate. We further assess that foreign adversaries are more likely to focus election-related cyber operations on undermining the credibility of the electoral process than on clandestinely manipulating the vote outcome through cyber means.
We judge that Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea can execute a variety of disruptive cyber attacks, including data corruption, distributed denial of service, and even data modification on some election infrastructure. Depending on the adversaries’ level of access and the targeted system’s vulnerabilities, some nation states and non-state actors could probably corrupt or deny many online election services, modify or delete entries in Internet-connected voter registration databases, and corrupt some electronically cast or tabulated votes in some voting precincts. Adversaries might also target the most contested or decisive locales and voting blocs in order to maximize the psychological impact of cyber attacks. Although unlikely, in a “perfect storm,” a cyber adversary might be able to target a small number of critical counties in highly contested states with significant numbers of Electoral College votes, potentially altering the apparent outcome of and almost certainly undermining public confidence in the election.
We judge Russia has conducted cyber and intelligence operations that suggest that it has potential interest in disrupting the US presidential election….
System diversity and existing safeguards would be likely to prevent the undetected manipulation of election results, according to DHS. However, multiple technical pathways exist to undermine public confidence in the electoral process.
In other words, Russia had the capability and did hack into systems in ways that showed they were testing out that ability, but there is no evidence that they actually did change anything, and such evidence would be apparent to the government, had they tried. And that last bit, the documents say elsewhere, is likely why they didn’t try.
My own Russian experience
I come to a different conclusion than Gabbard’s own. All the documents she shows state repeatedly that Russia was deeply involved in attacking the election via subversion through social media posts (likely bots making fake posts and specifically through troll farms, such as in the comment sections of US publications).
I wrote many articles for two publications the US government was concerned about—Zero Hedge and RT (formerly Russia Today)—because I’m the kind of guy who makes it his mission to point out political and economical wrongdoing in the US, and who usually has to publish that in the alternative media willing to carry it because mainstream media won’t. I don’t do it to make the US look bad, but to push the US to clean up its act and BE good. That way, it won’t look bad. I have no wish to harm my country but every wish to make it act better.
When I used to get published and promoted regularly on Zero Hedge for writing about the US economy, I repeatedly pointed out how most comments on Zero Hedge sounded like they came from a troll farm. That particularly came through after I started posting there about Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, and ZH immediately stopped promoting those articles that I uploaded to them via the means they had long provided. Since they effectively killed all those articles, I started writing those same kinds of things in comments to counter their incessant pro-Russian stance, and I was eventually excommunicated altogether from Zero Hedge for providing that service to them. The US had already stated belief that ZH was a Russian disinformation/propaganda site.
Until I was cut off, I sometimes replied to those who commented against me on Ukraine by saying their comments looked like they were written by some troll in his bedroom with a sheet over the window for a curtain, sitting in his underwear late at night with a pack of cigarettes twisted in his shirt sleeve who was paid in vodka. The files Gabbard now presents state that Russia appeared to be using ordinary people as paid trolls to make sure its point-of-view on the candidates and American election integrity were broadly disseminated, confirming exactly what I was sensing.
After Biden’s government saw to it that I was fired from my regular job for not getting vaccinated, I started doing more paid writing for RT because I needed a new income source. I had written for them for a few years, even though I knew the US government also believed they were a Russian propaganda site. My motivation was getting the truth out, and there were plenty of stories I believed to be true that RT was happy to publish. They fed a few of them me to write about by providing links to published info and asking if I’d be interesting in pulling those together into a story, such as this one: “Want to Know Where Your Money Goes? Sex, lies and the United States Navy—Meet Fat Leonard.’" Most, however, were my own ideas that I ran past them.
The point is that my experience writing for RT for about $200 per article squares up exactly with what I read in Gabbard’s documents regarding the US government’s conclusions about RT. They never pushed me to write anything on any topic. They offered suggestions of what they thought I might be interested in that they were interested in. They took proposals from me of stories I’d like to write, and they paid reasonably well. They gave me chances to appear on television, and were always very pleasant to work with. They never suggested any edits that would change what I had to say or add bias in a particular direction, but they always selected stories that would either tend to make the US look bad (such as about slimy politicians or a failing economy or that would make Russia look reasonably good); but they never pushed anything on me or asked me to slant anything, and that is how the intelligence community documents Gabbard presented talk about RT—highly funded, reasonably good paying, extremely popular, never pushing writers to a point of view, but fishing for stories they wanted that would keep focusing their publication on the Russian government’s angle without ever actually saying that; but I could tell by what they were choosing and what they were turning down.
My government, on the other hand, worked by censoring my writing. Publishers told me Google was seriously downgrading my articles in its search engine whenever I wrote on Covid to where they dropped from 500,000 readers per article to about 50,000, and Google wrote to me directly to tell me that they were cutting off ad revenue on all the pages on my own site that ran my Covid articles. Other articles were unaffected. We all eventually learned the Biden government pressured Google toward doing that. So, I found more freedom with Russia than with the US.
Because they were so pleasant to work with, I hated to break things off with them. As soon as Putin invaded Ukraine, RT offered me a position on a television panel giving an American’s angle on Putin’s “special operation in Ukraine.” I turned that opportunity down because I knew they would not like my positions on Putin’s intentional slaughter of thousands of civilians in order to grab land to rebuild the former Russian empire. So, it would not end well for me.
They assumed, since they had liked so much of what I sent them, including my television interview with them on my Covid experience in the US, that I’d be critical of the US there, too, but I knew I’d be harshly critical of Russia. You see, I hate Russian imperial wars as much as I hate US imperial wars. I also knew that our two nations were now in a proxy war, so me continuing to get checks directly from Moscow might be a red flag for the US government, albeit a meaningless one. So, I told them I was breaking things off, and I haven’t written for them since.
Neither ZH nor RT ever pushed me to write anything I didn’t fully believe in and want to write, but they were both only interested in what made the US look bad. Of course, it’s a big country, so there is always plenty of corruption and economic stupidity to write about, and it is my own preference to expose those things, just as I’m doing in this article. I also figured sanctions would prevent future payments from a Moscow bank from going through, so I might as well make a clean break, rather than trying to just keep writing stories that had nothing to do with the war.
Given that the intel documents present RT in exactly that light, rather than try to make some case about how they add a slant to stories to make the US look bad or how they try to get people make up stories, I think the US intel is surprisingly balanced and carefully accurate; but it does NOT show what Gabbard claims.
The whole scenario I presented of someone writing in his underwear to use the comments section to present a Russian bias, rather than to steer news articles in untruthful directions, fits what I see in the IC documents Gabbard links to. I just expressed it more colorfully than anything the government documents say—just average Joes paid to write pro-Russian comments they believe in.
There is no “there” there
Over and over, the US intel documents Gabbard presents state there are vulnerabilities in the electronic infrastructure to hacking and changing actual election tabulations but that they saw almost no evidence of Russia using those weaknesses because it was too likely they’d get caught; and over and over they state they had abundant evidence that Russia was using Social media and other means, such as release of hacked emails, to manipulate US public opinion. There were some minor “denial of service attacks” that directly affected votes, but those were limited and did not meaningfully change vote outcomes.
The following represents a typical summary assessment in the documents:
We assess that Russian and criminal actors did not impact recent US election results by conducting malicious cyber activities against election infrastructure. Russian Government–affiliated actors most likely compromised an Illinois voter registration database and unsuccessfully attempted the same in other states. Election monitoring and the type of systems targeted—infrastructure not used to cast or count votes—make it highly unlikely it would have resulted in altering any state’s official vote result. Criminal activity also failed to reach the scale and sophistication necessary to change election outcomes.
I don’t see anything to support Gabbard’s case. In fact, the documents are so different from her slant on them, that I think she is making her case at the behest of the president who desperately needs a new narrative. The IC always said Russia was interfering a lot to influence the election, just not by hacking voting equipment to the best they could tell. That is far different than more broadly stating Russia was not trying to influence US elections, using cyber means, as Gabbard claims the initial documents state.
The IC docs even state it was not clear if it was the Russian government or completely independent Russian hackers when their were minor incidents affecting election equipment:
We have low-to-moderate confidence in the Russian Government’s involvement because of our uncertainty about its utility for a state actor, a lack of observed effects from the low-profile operation, and the actors’ use of obfuscation techniques, which included substantial overlap with criminal actors using similar targeting patterns and tactics. The activities did coincide with high-profile Russian cyber-enabled data leaks during the election, which we assess probably were intended to cause psychological effects, such as undermining the credibility of the election process and candidates … but these actions did not achieve a notable disruptive effect. Several technical issues with computer-enabled infrastructure were also reported, but they probably were routine software or hardware malfunctions.
The most important thing is there is nothing before or after the election in the documents that implicates Donald Trump in anything—just Russia. In leaving out the parts about “voting infrastructure,” Gabbard leaves out precisely what the IC was talking about when it said Russia was not involved with some cyber activity. However, she also leaves out all the parts that clearly state in the early days that Russia was heavily involved in cyber activity to create and spread propaganda through media influence and to gather intel. That point of view is consistent from the beginning to the very end of the documents.
The notion that Russia changed vote tabulations was never a memorable part of the claims made by Democrats against Russia after Trump took office. In fact, there is only one set of documents at the end of the material, right before Trump’s inauguration that even has Trump’s name in it, and that does not in any way imply he was collaborating with Russia or that the Obama Admins’ view of what Russia was doing changed. It’s just the first time Trump’s name is brought in:
We assess Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in the summer of 2016 aimed at the US presidential election. Russia’s goals were to undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency. We further assess Putin and the Russian Government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump. We have high confidence in these judgments based on a body of intelligence reporting and the public behavior of senior Russian officials and state- controlled media. We also assess Putin and the Russian Government aspired to help President-elect Trump’s election chances when possible by discrediting Secretary Clinton and publicly contrasting her unfavorably to him….
Moscow’s influence campaign followed a Russian messaging strategy that blends covert intelligence operations—such as cyber activity—with overt efforts by Russian Government agencies, state-funded media, third-party intermediaries, and paid social media users or “trolls.” Russia and the Soviet Union have a history of conducting covert influence campaigns focused on US presidential elections, which has used intelligence officers and agents and press placements to disparage candidates perceived as hostile to the Kremlin.
Before hearing any claims of Russian collusion during Trump’s first term, much less seeing Gabbard’s documentation, there was little room to doubt that Russia hated Hillary and preferred to have Trump as president, even without this intel. Trump, however, is not mentioned at all in the first 90% of the documentation, and the nineteen times where his name is brought up in the last part of documents, it is only to state that the IC believed Russia preferred candidate Trump over candidate Clinton, but nothing that tries to implicate Trump in anything and still nothing saying Russia’s interference changed the outcome of the election.
Gabbard’s conclusion that “On January 6, 2017, a new Intelligence Community Assessment was released that directly contradicted the IC assessments that were made throughout the previous six months” is false and cannot be supported by any of the documentation she provided.
The statements that Russia did not directly change election results by hacking the infrastructure are consistent throughout. Contrary to her statement that initial assessments said Russia did not try to interfere with cyber activity, all of them, through the very earliest, state that Russia DID interfere using cyber activity, but just not with direct hacking of election equipment. The documents are consistent throughout in claiming that Russia did actively and constantly try to influence public opinion via cyber means.
She makes her case based on the difference between the final documents in January and the original documents—after Trump won when Team Obama suddenly had a new regime they wanted to undermine—but the only difference is that the post-election documents state who Russia’s preferred candidate was, but who among us didn’t already know that? From the moment Hillary Clinton presented her joke of a reset button to Russia’s Foreign Minister Lavrov to “restart Russian relations,” she did nothing but poison the United States’ relationship with Russia.
It looked more like a nuclear launch button than a reset button in my opinion, and all her subsequent actions took us further toward nuclear confrontation.
As I documented on my own site via unclassified State Deptartment documents that I got from Wikileaks, Hillary started two wars to placate Israel. The first was to overthrow Ghadaffi in Libya, and the second was to overthrow Putin’s longtime ally Bashar Assad in Syria. (For an archived excerpt from my now deceased website see “Wikileaks proves Syria is about Iran & Israel.”) Hillary’s Department of State argued that toppling Assad was necessary to placate Israel by helping it eliminate one long-standing enemy, which her State Dept argued would earn Israel’s trust enough to resist its inclination to bomb Iran in order to scuttle the JCPA.
Overthrowing Ghadaffi was merely a means to that end, her department argued because, showing how easily the US got rid of Ghadaffi would soften Assad into easier surrender. Well, we all know how badly that plan failed. So, to think that there was ever the slightest chance Russia’s interference in the campaign days would have been in favor of Hillary, after Russia rushed in to help save Assad, probably never occurred to anyone because it was impossible.
So, the documents presented as evidence that the Obama Administration weaponized the intelligence community, in my view as I dug down through the hundred+ pages, all show a Russian government intensely interfering with the US elections at the level of cyber influence, but NEVER show any hint that the Obama Administration was trying to say Trump and Russia collaborated nor even to say Hillary would have won if Russia had not interfered.
Given how strong Gabbard’s statements are about crimes on the highest order of treason and how direct she is in seeking prosecution for criminal behavior of top-level Obama officials, I thought I’d find a smoking gun in the documents where emails clearly talked about how the administration would frame Trump up or, at least, talked about evidence that he collaborated with Russia; but she never found anything of the kind.
Because this is a massive set of cases to stake on the mere evidence that the intel community said, after the election, that Pooty liked Trump best, it reads to me like a “Trumped-up” report where her boss pressed her to make the best case she could because he was certain he was framed and has said for a long time that he would get revenge on those who “weaponized” the DoJ and the intelligence community against him. Pressed hard to find evidence to build those cases, Gabbard found only one document in January that said Putin liked Trump best of the two choices he had. Big deal! That’s the whole thing.
The IC documents made such statements as the following, but nothing further:
Russian efforts to influence the 2016 US presidential election represent the most recent expression of Moscow’s longstanding desire to undermine the US-led liberal democratic order, but these activities demonstrated a significant escalation in directness, level of activity, and scope of effort compared to previous operations.
We assess Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in the summer of 2016 aimed at the US presidential election. Russia’s goals were to undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency. We further assess Putin and the Russian Government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump.
We also assess Putin and the Russian Government aspired to help President-elect Trump’s election chances when possible by discrediting Secretary Clinton and publicly contrasting her unfavorably to him.
Maybe they did, but the intel community never suggested in the documents Gabbard provides that Trump had any hand in it.
Putin publicly indicated a preference for the President-elect’s stated policy to work with Russia, and pro-Kremlin figures spoke highly about what they saw as his Russia-friendly positions on Syria and Ukraine. Putin contrasted President-elect Trump’s approach to Russia with Secretary Clinton’s “aggressive rhetoric,” according to Russian press reporting.
So, he had a preference. I think that is not the least bit surprising; but there is nothing here where Obama’s team even implies any wrongdoing by Trump.
Starting in March 2016, Russian Government–linked actors began openly supporting President-elect Trump’s candidacy in media aimed at English-speaking audiences. RT and Sputnik—another government-funded outlet producing pro-Kremlin radio and online content in a variety of languages for international audiences—consistently cast President-elect Trump as the target of unfair coverage from traditional US media outlets that they claimed were subservient to a corrupt political establishment.
So did Fox News. I’ve written that kind of thing about US media, too. I assure you I wasn’t conspiring with Trump to help him out. Assessing that Putin’s state media favored Trump is hardly an act of Treason by any member of the US intel community, demanding prosecution of top-tier actors in the Obama Admin. for figuring that no-brainer out. Yet, that is what Gabbard is pushing for.
It’s a big deal that Russia was doing all it could to manipulate US voters through troll farms and bots posting propaganda all over social media and in comment sections, which fits what I was seeing at the two Russia-biased sites I wrote with. Now, we’ve got the report where the IC said Russia was doing a lot of that kind of thing electronically with fake IDs, etc. to help Trump win. Yet, not a word about any involvement by Trump, not even a hint that Team Obama believed Trump was even suspected of collaborating with Russia and almost nothing about the Steele Dossier, except to say that James Clapper did not feel James Comey should have told Trump it was presented to Obama. There is nothing stating why the Steele Dossier was created, who paid for it, or why it was presented to Obama in the first place and later to Trump or about who made those decisions.
As fired up as Gabbard is, you’d think she found documents where Putin talked to candidate Trump and said, “We’ll help you get elected if you promise to stand down on Ukraine” or that she found emails from Obama to Clapper saying, “I need you to search all your documents for Trump’s name and find anything that might indicate Trump was collaborating with Russia” or, in the very least, find an assessment claiming “Intel about Russia’s interest in Trump implied cooperation between Trump’s campaign and Russia based on ____.” Nada thing.
There is no “there” there.
Some actual weaponization of the DoJ
Now, if you want to try to find evidence of a president trying to use the apparatus of government for his own benefit, you might look to President Trump in his effort to push Gabbard into creating a case for the DoJ to make against Obama officials; but, even more, take a look into this little story that came out on Friday:
FBI agents assigned earlier this year to review investigative files in the criminal case against notorious sex offender Jeffrey Epstein were instructed to “flag” any documents that mentioned President Donald Trump, Sen. Richard Durbin said Friday.
Durbin’s claim came in letters the Illinois Democrat sent to the Justice Department and FBI asking them to explain discrepancies between past statements about a promised release of the Epstein files and findings from a July 7 Justice Department memo, which said no such release would happen.
Durbin’s letters, addressed to Attorney General Pam Bondi, FBI Director Kash Patel, and Deputy FBI Director Dan Bongino, add to the pressure on the Trump administration over Bondi’s decision to withhold from the public evidence about Epstein despite her past promises.
The implication in Durban’s demand is that he believes Trump wanted the files flagged so that his people could quickly scrub any documentation the government had that would implicate Trump in any of Epstein’s wrongdoings or that would tarnish him just by association with Epstein.
Was Trump’s stalling in releasing the files his administration long promised to release done to gain time to scrub them all up and get them squeaky clean? If so, that must have been no small task because Durbin says it involved hundreds of agents:
“Who made the decision to reassign hundreds of New York Field Office personnel to this March review of Epstein-related records?” Durbin asked in his letters.
“Why were personnel told to flag records in which President Trump was mentioned?” he asked.
If they were told to flag every file that mentioned Trump, it’s pretty clear Trump wanted to know what all the files said about him. Now, he MAY have just thought the Obama Administration or its surrogate, the Biden Admin, doctored documents to implicate him, but that is what he thought with the Russian collusion stuff, yet Gabbard failed to produce any smoking gun on that.
The alternative is that Trump knows there very well might be things the files factually show about wrong activities on his part, and he wants to scrub them.
An FBI spokesperson told CNBC in an email, “The FBI has no comment,” when asked about Durbin’s letters.
Why the secrecy? Why not state why Trump was asking to have any file with his name flagged? If all the government came up with was stuff like the bawdy drawing he supposedly made for Epstein’s birthday, there isn’t much there. We all know Trump was a playboy, but that doesn’t impicate him in pedophilia, as I’m sure Epstein’s sex casino ran more than one game for its clientele and friends. Why wouldn’t it? Finding out that Trump cheated on his wives with supermodels and flight attendants would hardly be news. We all know that!
Durbin’s letters detailed Justice Department and FBI actions in March, in the weeks after Bondi told Fox News on Feb. 21 that the so-called Epstein client list was “sitting on my desk right now to review.”
Durbin, as a wise inquirer, doesn’t state his reason for asking, but I think it’s pretty clear he suspects Trump of trying to change the records, trying to get rid of some evidence IF it is there—not that Durbin has reason to believe it is there, but just that he has knowledge that agents were asked to flag Trump’s name and naturally wonders what Trump was up to with that demand.
Why did Bondi make so much about all the info that would be released, and then … nothing!?
Oh, and Trump’s effort to flag files was bigger than Durbin’s first statement indicated:
Durbin said his office had learned that after that, the “FBI was pressured to put approximately 1,000 personnel in its Information Management Division … on 24-hour shifts to review approximately 100,000 Epstein-related records in order to produce more documents that could then be released on an arbitrarily short deadline.”
“This effort, which reportedly took place from March 14 through the end of March, was haphazardly supplemented by hundreds of FBI New York Field Office personnel…. My office was told that these personnel were instructed to ‘flag’ any records in which President Trump was mentioned.”
All of that, and suddenly Bondi announced, “Nothing to see here!” And Bongino and Patel said, “Video proof that Epstein killed himself.” Then they presented a video that didn’t show any part of the jail we would need to see in order to know if anyone “visited” Epstein that night to help him out.
“Notably, in 2002, Mr. Trump said of Mr. Epstein, ‘I’ve known Jeff for 15 years. Terrific guy, He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side,’ ” Durbin wrote.
“We did not uncover evidence that could predicate an investigation against uncharged third parties.”
Not one person in 100,000 records who was even implicated enough for possibly using underage women for sex to “predicate an investigation?” Not even enough to assemble just two names to create “a list” after crushing those 100,000 records with well over a thousand investigators poring through every detail about the full life of a slime ball whose wife is in prison for twenty years because she ran the girl trafficking and recruiting for him? The same gal and guy that Trump and Melania were more than once photographed partying with? That sets a high bar for willful suspension of disbelief.
It smells to me like Gabbard’s shorthanded investigation that came up with diddly squat is a rushed effort to start a different news cycle that turns against the Democrats—one perfectly flavored to arouse the MAGA crowd with the smell of Democrats, ready for roasting. Talk about a red herring to throw the dogs off the scent.
“While we have labored to provide the public with maximum information regarding Epstein and ensured examination of any evidence in the government’s possession, it is the determination of the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation that no further disclosure would be appropriate or warranted,” the memo said.
Huh! Why didn’t Gabbard come to that same determination with her investigation into the Obama “weaponization” of the intel community against Trump? Something like “There is no reason to even investigate further because the ONLY thing we could find was a single document where the IC concluded Putin liked Trump better than Clinton.” She couldn’t even find an Obama White House email like the one where Team Trump recently asked the FBI, CIA, and NSA to flag documents that have Trump’s name in the file—something where the Obama White House said, “What do we have on Trump?”
But photos, videos and anecdotes paint a picture of a close friendship, of two middle-aged men who repeatedly partied together both alone and with their partners, including with Melania Knauss, who would go on to become Trump’s third wife.
For someone who later protested “I was not a fan of his,” Trump spent a lot of time cavorting with Epstein, and now is apparently obsessed with making sure he knows every single thing that is in the government’s Epstein collection. Maybe he and Bondi are right in this sense: Maybe there is no longer a client list.
There are plenty of society section articles over the years about Trump and Epstein partying together, such as this one:
George Houraney, a Florida-based businessman, had organized a “calendar girl” competition at Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s private members’ club where he would later live full-time.
Houraney flew more than two dozen women to Mar-a-Lago, but he had a surprise when they arrived.
“I arranged to have some contestants fly in,” Houraney told the Times. “At the very first party, I said, ‘Who’s coming tonight? I have 28 girls coming.’ It was him and Epstein.”
Houraney said he was surprised. “I said: ‘Donald, this is supposed to be a party with VIPs. You’re telling me it’s you and Epstein?’”
Just a little social party with a couple dozen women flown in for just The Don and Epstain.
Back then, Trump made no secret of the friendship. He was pictured with Epstein at events and parties from New York to Florida.
But “I was not a fan of his.”
Is this like Clinton’s “It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is?” Maybe Trump is saying he was not a “fan” because he was really a lot more like a “comrade in arms” or an “accomplice.” To be a “fan”—a fanatic—would imply Trump was someone less than Epstein, practically worshipping him.
In 1993 Stacey Williams, then a professional model, visited Trump at Trump Tower with Epstein. On arrival, she would later tell the Guardian, Trump put his hands “all over my breasts”, waist and buttocks while Trump and Epstein smiled at each other, in what she believed was a “twisted game” between the two men.
“It became very clear then that he and Donald were really, really good friends and spent a lot of time together,” Williams said in 2024.
So, maybe not a “fan.” Just “really, really good friends’ for over a decade … until Trump beat him out of a deal on a Florida estate and the friendship ended.
Here’s an idea: maybe people like Williams could, at least, help the Trump government in its apparently insurmountable task of creating a list of names of people who should be investigated for possible wrongdoing with the Epstein girls. She might be able to remember a few names worth, at least, investigating.
What is undeniable is that the men maintained their relationship through the 1990s. They were photographed at Mar-a-Lago, and the same year were pictured together at a Victoria’s Secret Angels event in New York. The relationship endured. Photos show Trump and Epstein with Melania Trump and Ghislaine Maxwell at an event in 2000. Maxwell would be sentenced to 20 years in prison in 2022 for procuring teen girls for Jeffrey Epstein for him to abuse – when she was charged with the crimes Trump responded: “I just wish her well, frankly.”
Wish her well? Who says that about anyone who is not a very close friend right after finding out the person is going to jail for trafficking young women? Who even says it on behalf of a close friend after a sentence that disgusting?
Years later Epstein would tell the journalist Michael Wolff that he had been Trump’s “closest friend for 10 years”, in audio tapes published on Wolff’s Fire and Fury podcast last year. Epstein also told Wolff that Trump liked to “fuck the wives of his best friends”, and said the first time he slept with Melania Trump was on Epstein’s plane. Trump’s camp claimed that Wolff was engaging in “false smears” and “election interference.”
The close friendship wouldn’t last. The relationship soured in 2004, according to reports, after the pair became embroiled in a bidding war over a property in Palm Beach. In 2019, after Epstein was arrested, he said he had not spoken to Trump for 15 years. And despite his own close relationship with Epstein, Trump would go on to criticize others for the same thing, with Bill Clinton a particular source of deflection. Trump even shared a conspiracy theory that the former president was involved in Epstein’s death – ironically sparking more intrigue in the case. Trump told reporters days after Epstein died:
“The question you have to ask is, did Bill Clinton go to the island? Because Epstein had an island. That was not a good place, as I understand it, and I was never there.” Trump adds: “So you have to ask, did Bill Clinton go to the island? That’s the question. If you find that out, you’re going to know a lot.”
Given photos of the young Melania in her supermodel days partying with Trump and Jeff and Ghislaine, it’s not hard to believe Trump first connected with Melania on Epstein’s private jet. Whether or not that detail is true, however, Trump’s playboy reputation was highly cultivated by Trump, himself, with great pride for years, and his movement from wives to new pretty girlfriends that later become replacement wives is clearly true, and documentation of a number of really great parties with the Epstein’s and Melania as well as on his own with Jeffrey also all clearly true.
A 1992 tape from the NBC archives shows Trump partying with Epstein at his Mar-a-Lago estate; Trump is seen pulling a woman toward him and patting her behind.
Trump, along with others including Clinton, also appeared several times on flight logs for Epstein’s private jet.
I guess Trump would know, in that case, where Clinton was since flight logs show them traveling on the same plane. Maybe that is why, when it finally came time to lock Hillary up, Trump surprised his supporters by saying of the Clinton’s, “But they're good people.” After all, you cannot lock the Clintons up and still keep them silent about the events they have first-hand knowledge of while partying with you. Once they know you’re sending the off to jail anyway, they will talk!
That is how Epstein-style blackmail or “compromising,” as it is called, works. The power to keep powerful people silent only works UNTIL you lock them up. After that, they no longer have anything to lose. You have to keep them in the state of being threatened by the possibility of what you will reveal in order to keep them silent about all that they could reveal. Blackmail only works until you use it!
Given his own words that Epstein had a fondness for women “on the younger side,” maybe Trump, himself, could create a list from memory of the names of people he saw at those parties with some clearly younger women who ought to be investigated.
I have to conclude that the Gabbard Files, besides being an act of vengeance Trump has overtly stated he would push for via the DoJ (the kind of move we call “weaponization of the DoJ”), are an opportunely timed distraction, given how little “there” there is in Gabbard’s documentation to support multiple trials for high crimes of treason.
Where’s the beef?
And, so, here we are:
Trump now finds himself in a mess that is partly of his own making. The “Epstein didn’t commit suicide” conspiracy theory in which he dabbled quickly spread among rightwing commentators and media figures – many of whom demanded that documents related to Epstein’s associates be released. When the Department of Justice failed to do so last week, it caused a rarely seen rift between Trump and his supporters, with Trump trying to brush off the saga, and his supporters angry at a perceived lack of transparency….
But looking back at Trump’s statements on the Epstein files during the campaign, the president appeared to be leaving himself wriggle room.
Asked in an interview in September if he would declassify “the 9/11 files” and “the JFK files”, Trump said yes. He is then asked if he would declassify “the Epstein files”, and initially said yes, but added:
“I think that [declassifying the Epstein files], less so, because you don’t know – you don’t want to affect people’s lives if there’s phoney stuff in there, because there’s a lot of phoney stuff with that whole world.”
That wavering hasn’t helped Trump, however, as he has attempted to quash his supporters’ rebellion.
All efforts to quell his supporters’ demands for transparency, having failed, it’s time for a necessary diversion, and the Gabbard Files arrive right on time but short on solid food for fodder.
Trump has said their friendship ended before Epstein pleaded guilty to procuring a minor for prostitution in 2008, served time in a Florida jail and registered as a sex offender.
Sure before Epstein pleaded guilty, but not before he did the act that made him guilty. As with Trump’s former fellow partiers on Epstein Air, or the “Lolita Express,” it all depends on what the meaning of the word “is” is. So, the scrubbers are working overtime, as is the counter intelligence op to create a new narrative to spawn a hopefully new news cycle that will shift focus to the Democratic weaponization of the intelligence community during the good ol’ Obama days when the Clintons and Trumps had time to party together because neither were in office. Meanwhile, Trump’s poor friend, whom he had wished well, rots away in prison for her solitary sex crimes of trafficking young women with non-existing clients who never used them.
It all casts a new light on comments like this:
Trump told reporters at the White House that he believed some Epstein files were “made up” by former Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden and former FBI Director James Comey.
I’m sure any files that got flagged for having Trump’s name in them by the 1,000+ of special agents Trump ordered to comb all the Epstein Files will be designated as “made up by Obama.” But now we have a new made-up case against Obama to distract our attention from Trump’s work in those playboy days, promising to prove “treason” on the basis that Obama’s intel community claimed Pooty liked Trump better than his co-partier Clinton. Maybe Pooty was just mad that he never got invited to Epstain Island along with the rest.
Bondi initially blamed the FBI’s New York office for withholding information and promised to release the remaining documents after redacting the victim’s names. Patel also said, “There will be no coverups, no missing documents and no stone left unturned.” They tasked hundreds of FBI employees to review the materials and prepare them for release.
One could see why it would take hundreds of FBI employees if “prepare them for release” meant expunge them before release. However, given that Team Trump ultimately decided to release none of them after swearing they would release all of them, one has to wonder how much stuff they must have found to expunge to make it so difficult to get certain parts out without leaving big redacted areas that begged for a lot of explanation that could ultimately be leaked to prove you concealed stuff that was bad for your team.
It also kind of casts a new shade of meaning on this:
The issue took on new life in June when Elon Musk, amid a public feud with Trump, alleged that the FBI was withholding documents from the Epstein case because Trump was in the files….
The Justice Department said that after an “exhaustive review” it had found no “incriminating client list” or additional documents that warrant public disclosure.
An “exhaustive revue” that found nothing in a case that sent Epstein to jail, resulted in him—we’re now told by Dan Bongino and Kash Patel who once told us the opposite—committing suicide because the news was going to be so bad for him and that landed other good people, which is to say particularly Epstein’s wife, in prison for twenty years!
And you’re supposed to believe there is nothing to see there? Here, quick! Look at these intel files from Obama that prove he weaponized the government against Trump by stating Putin liked Trump better than Hillary. Squirrel!
Thank you, Tulsi, for bringing Putin’s fancy for Trump to our attention, even though he was a whole lot less fond of Trump than Epstein was or than either of those two were of the young ladies. (See video that follows.)
Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee demanded this week that Republican Chairman Jim Jordan hold hearings on the Trump administration’s handling of the Epstein files and, if necessary, subpoena Bondi, Patel and Bongino.
Don’t worry. Jordan will back his guy like a junkyard dog because that is what matters, not getting to the bottom of who raped the girls that the Trump Admin says were never statutorily raped by any real people. Jordan will make sure that congress tables the Democrats’ demands so that it can focus its efforts on the Putin-Trump love affair that is now such ancient news “I cannot believe we are still talking about that creep.”
“Are people still talking about this guy, this creep?” Trump said. “That is unbelievable. Do you want to waste the time?”
It is all unbelievable. I’ll give it that much, but I’d rather “waste time” on the alleged statutory rape of a thousand underage women again and again by sick people of power, including, potentially, presidents of the United States, than on whether Putin’s personal fondness for Trump was something the intel community just made up in order to nail Trump. If we’re not going to pursue people of power and prestige who allegedly have done things as dark as that, what do we care if Putin messed up any of their chances to get elected?