Documents released Friday by National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard "completely explode" claims that Russia interfered "specifically to help President Donald Trump" in the 2016 presidential election, reporter Matt Taibbi said Friday to Newsmax.
"Now that we know what that conclusion rested on, among other things, that the key piece of evidence was a single fragment of a single comment made to the director of the CIA personally by a Russian defector in Virginia, and we don't know whether it's opinion or what the original source of it was. That's incredibly damning," Taibbi told "National Report."
"And it's damning that [former President Barack Obama's] own team tried to avoid including it," he added.
The ODNI on Friday published a press release asserting that Gabbard "revealed overwhelming evidence" that Obama and his national security officials "manufactured and politicized intelligence" to launch a "yearslong coup against President Trump."
A spokesperson for Obama called Gabbard's allegations that the former president orchestrated and manufactured intelligence "nonsense, ridiculous and bizarre."
"It's not nonsense," said Taibbi.
"I don't know that you could legally support a claim that Barack Obama definitively knew that it was false. However, there was significant evidence that the intelligence community was deeply divided on all of these questions and that the president would have been aware of that at that time," he said.
"Also, there had already been serious questions raised about the key pieces of evidence that were used in this intelligence community assessment that Obama had to have been briefed about. He almost certainly had to have known that it came from campaign research that was originally originated by Hillary Clinton's campaign."
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Solange Reyner ✉
Solange Reyner is a writer and editor for Newsmax. She has more than 15 years in the journalism industry reporting and covering news, sports and politics.
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