Julian E. Barnes and David E. Sanger
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence on Friday issued the latest in a series of reports from the Trump administration attempting to undermine the eight-year-old assessment that Russia favored the election of Donald J. Trump in 2016.
Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, said the information she was releasing showed a “treasonous conspiracy in 2016” by top Obama administration officials to harm Mr. Trump.
Democrats denounced the effort as politically motivated, error-ridden and in contradiction with previous reviews of the assessment.
Representative Jim Himes of Connecticut, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, called Ms. Gabbard’s accusation of treason “baseless.”
Intelligence agencies and Senate investigators spent years reviewing the work, and concluded that during the 2016 election, the Russians conducted probing operations of election systems to see if they could change vote outcomes. While they extracted voter registration data in Illinois and Arizona, and probed in other states, there was no evidence that Moscow’s hackers attempted to actually change votes.
The Obama administration assessment never contended that Russian hackers manipulated votes.
Russia also conducted influence operations to change public opinion. That included using fake social media posts to sow division among Americans and leaking documents stolen from the Democratic National Committee to denigrate Hillary Clinton, the Democratic presidential nominee.
Multiple reviews, including a Republican-led Senate report, backed the findings of American spy agencies in late 2016 that Russia was trying to influence the election by damaging Ms. Clinton’s campaign and bolstering Mr. Trump.
Among the Republican senators on the Intelligence Committee that produced the various reports on Russian influence operations was Marco Rubio of Florida, now the secretary of state.
The new report by Ms. Gabbard’s staff conflates those two activities by the Russians and tries to suggest that the Obama administration forced the intelligence community to alter its conclusions.
