Last week, as the question of President Trump’s relationship with Jefrrey Epstein occupied the public’s attention, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard rolled out the shiniest ball at her disposal: Actually, she (and, immediately afterward, her boss) claimed, the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election was an attempted coup by Barack Obama.

It was not, as multiple investigations not undertaken by Trump allies have established. The purported evidence undergirding Gabbard’s new claim was, as I wrote earlier this week, unconvincing cherry-picking that relies centrally on dishonestly conflating “Russia didn’t hack election systems” with “Russia didn’t engage in any electronic influence efforts.” Just go read the thing I wrote before if you want more details. No point in writing it again!

On Wednesday, Gabbard offered up another previously classified document aimed at casting the Russia probe as partisan. “New evidence has emerged,” she wrote on X, “that “of the most egregious weaponization and politicization of intelligence in American history.” Ignoring the irony of that sentence in that post, Gabbard linked to that new evidence: a report assessing (among other things) that the claim Vladimir Putin wanted Trump to win in 2016 was weaker than presented in a report created by the intelligence community in the waning days of Obama’s presidency.

What Gabbard’s been doing isn’t complicated. She’s plucking isolated comments from intelligence agents and using them to suggest that the story that was told about Russia and Trump was false and offered in bad faith. Importantly, there’s little evidence offered to provide counter-narrative. There’s no methodical construction of an argument that Obama and his aides sought to impugn Trump, just a declaration that they did so with little slivers of doubt jammed in where possible to justify the broad claim.

One key target audience — Trump’s base — needs little more than that. Consider this post from Gabbard, one of a series aimed at spreading the baseless claims on social media:

LIE: Putin and the Russian Government helped Trump win the 2016 election

TRUTH: President Obama, former Director of the CIA John Brennan, and others fabricated the Russia Hoax, suppressed intelligence showing Putin was preparing for a Clinton victory, manufactured findings from… pic.twitter.com/nkaLDMrUSv

— DNI Tulsi Gabbard (@DNIGabbard) July 23, 2025

How is it a lie that the Russians helped Trump when even the report declassified and shared by Gabbard today documents the overlap of declining poll numbers for Hillary Clinton with the release on WikiLeaks of the material stolen by Russian actors? How is it subsequently “truth” that the investigation was “fabricated”? How does any evidence that Putin still thought Clinton would win run contrary to the idea that he and Russia sought to aid Trump?

Never mind, of course, the perennial problem with this idea that the Russia probe was meant to drive Trump from power: that the investigation began well before Trump was elected and that it never resulted in a threat to Trump’s presidency, thanks in part to Republicans holding power in the House for the first two years. The Obama administration didn’t try to block Trump from winning the 2016 election. In fact, the only point at which it put its thumb on the scale, however intentionally, was then-FBI Director James Comey’s last-minute announcement that an investigation into Hillary Clinton was being revived.

Anyway, none of this is really the point. The point, instead, is that the “new evidence” Gabbard presents, that she offers as a fair assessment that had been kept out of the public eye, is not. At the top of a thread in which Gabbard denounces the idea that the intelligence committee assessment as not being independent sits a link to a report that was explicitly not independent, but created by House Republicans loyal to Trump.

You don’t have to take my word for it. Just The News, a media site founded by Trump ally John Solomon, reports that the document shared by Gabbard was “was produced in 2018 during the 116th Congress under the leadership of then-Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.).” A product of the House Intelligence Committee, it was submitted to the CIA where it lay stagnant — until it recently became useful to elevate as an ostensibly buried analysis of what occurred during the Obama administration.

It’s a bit like taking a cheap bracelet and burying it in the dirt, only to dig it up later and display it to a marveling crowd, offering it for sale at a premium. It’s long been the case that uncovered information grabs the public’s (and the media’s) attention more vigorously than similar admissions. Gabbard’s making lemonade out of what was until now a lemon.

That the report centers on the idea that Putin wasn’t really trying to help Trump win is itself a tell. This is the thing that frustrated Trump the most from the outset, this idea that Putin had a role in a victory that Trump presented as a function of his own tremendous popularity. Whether Putin and Russia intervened solely to gum up American politics or specifically to hurt Clinton didn’t really matter from the perspective of the intelligence community as it sought to figure out how serious the threat was. But it sure mattered to Trump.

We’ve seen the product of the intelligence community’s work and we’ve seen various assessments of that product and of that work. We’ve seen Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team articulate what Russia did and how Trump’s team welcomed the effort as it happened. We’ve seen a bipartisan Senate committee reinforce and expand on that articulation.

Well, we have anyway. Trump and his allies — including Gabbard and including Nunes, now the head of Trump’s media company — have gone to great lengths to ensure that those things aren’t seen or, at least, aren’t treated seriously. Instead they see baseless, sloppy claims that puts the blame where Trump’s allies have always felt the blame belonged: on Democrats and on Obama and on everyone they already hate.

Earlier today, the Republican National Committee sent out a fundraising mail with a pitch that only a GOP diehard could love.

“Have you ever been to the big city?” it began, suggesting that, if so, “maybe it was New York, Los Angeles, or Chicago.” But those cities are no longer “beacons of American exceptionalism,” as they were when “we were growing up.” (Ahem.) Instead, “thanks to Democrat politicians, they’re now rat and feces infested gang headquarters for illegal immigrants.”

This appeal triggered a number of responses, as you might expect. Some centered on a bit of whataboutism: Can you imagine the response if the Democratic Party sent out a fundraising pitch centered on how disgusting and repulsive small-town America was?

I, of course, was more curious about what we actually know about these cities. Is it the case that Republicans don’t visit large cities? Is it the case, too, that they think these places are vile and disgusting?

Polling from YouGov answers the first question definitively. No, Republicans have been to large cities as often — maybe even more often! — than Democrats. They’re less likely to live there, we can assume, but it’s not like they haven’t been.

The most positively viewed city, YouGov found, was Nashville, Tenn. It is also a city that is viewed much more positively by Republicans than Democrats — who are also more likely to have been there.

As you might expect, net views of each city are more positive as the percentage of people who’ve visited them increases. Similarly, city dwellers are more likely to view the cities positively than are people who live in rural areas. You can see the connection between visits to a city and favorability when we look just at the views of Democrats.

Among Republicans, though, there’s no obvious correlation between having visited a city and a positive net view of the city.

What there is instead is a (modest) inverse correlation between views of the cities and how strongly they supported Kamala Harris last year. The more Democratic the vote, the more negative the views among Republicans.

And that’s the play. The RNC email isn’t talking about the urban hellscape of Nashville. It’s explicitly talking about the purported hellscape in New York City, a lovely town with low crime and lots to offer. It’s playing up the stereotype, not the reality — and it’s a stereotype that holds for a lot of these cities even after Republicans have been to them.

Speaking to reporters earlier today, President Trump demanded that the media cover what he called “the biggest scandal in the history of our country.”

No, it wasn’t that the sitting president is relentlessly cashing in on the presidency or that the sitting president staffed his administration with unqualified cronies or that the sitting president and his administration have subverted Congressional spending authorization or that the sitting president is systematically undercutting the Constitution and rejecting checks on his power as he pushes toward authoritarianism. It’s that the president two presidents ago, Barack Obama, “led a coup.”

Trump: We found absolute — this isn't like "Evidence" or like — this is proof, irrefutable proof that Obama was seditious, that Obama was trying to lead a coup, and with Hillary Clinton and all these other people, but Obama headed it up. This is the biggest scandal in the… pic.twitter.com/wiXtTmvkqB

— Acyn (@Acyn) July 22, 2025

Barack Obama did not “lead a coup” against Trump, of course, as I wrote a few days ago. What Obama did was serve as president during a period when Russia was seeking to influence the results of the 2016 election in Trump’s favor. That influence effort overlapped with Trump staffing his campaign with a number of Russia-sympathetic actors, mostly because he was still seen as sufficiently toxic by the Republican establishment that relatively few legitimate consultants and advisers wanted to work with him. The probe that began under Obama included consideration of Trump’s potential complicity in the Russian effort, but Trump’s disgust about it seems more securely rooted in the idea that he only won because someone else put their hand on the scale.

Instead of rehashing what I already wrote, though, it’s useful to instead recognize why Trump is deploying this hyperbole at the moment. Trump offered this narrative about a devious Obama and his allies specifically in an effort to redirect the press’s questions about Jeffrey Epstein. This wasn’t subtle; Trump specifically told the reporters that they “ought take a look at that and stop talking about nonsense,” meaning Epstein. Why focus on his relationship with an accused sex trafficker when you could focus on the biggest scandal in history?

The proper response isn’t simply that the allegations against Obama aren’t a scandal at all, much less the largest. It should also note that Trump has repeatedly identified other things as the “biggest scandal” in history — at times when he’s trying to redirect attention away from something he doesn’t want to talk about. In November 2019, for example, he responded to questions about the ongoing impeachment probe by suggesting that the real scandal was … wait for it … the Russia probe.

Points for consistency on that one, at least. But here are a few other “scandals” which Trump has, at some point, described as the “biggest” he’d ever seen.

Oct. 30, 2016. Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server as Secretary of State
“So the 33,000 that she deleted and bleached, I think she gonna be in the 650. But how do you have that many emails. What do you do? Sit down all day and just keep on typing? Hey, no wonder, nothing gets done in our country. This is the single biggest scandal since Watergate.”

April 25, 2019. The investigation into Russian interference
“This was a coup. This was an attempted overthrow of the United States government. … This was an overthrow and it’s a disgraceful thing. And I don’t — I think it’s far bigger than Watergate. I think it’s possibly the biggest scandal in political history in this country.”

July 14, 2020. Hunter Biden working for a Ukrainian company
“Remember, where’s Hunter? People forget all about that stuff. If that were ever me, if that were ever me, it would be the biggest scandal in history.”

Sept. 27, 2020. His campaign being ‘spied on’
“This is a major scandal. This is a scandal, the likes of which nobody has ever seen. This is actually the biggest political scandal in the history of our country. And with the exception of a few, I mean, they just don’t want to write about it. You should read about that, Kelly, you know. You should write about it. You should write about it. You should do something on CNN about it, because it’s the biggest single scandal of our time; certainly the biggest political scandal, perhaps, in history.”

Oct. 9, 2020. Mail-in voting
“They’re sending out millions and millions of ballots. Are they sending them to all Democrats? Who are they sending them to? Where are they going? You know, etc., etc. This is going to be the second biggest political scandal in history” — behind the Russia probe.

Oct. 16, 2020. The Biden family’s businesses
“Here we have the biggest scandal going on anywhere in the world, the corruption of Joe Biden and the Biden family, and he’s interviewed last night by a Stephanopoulos on ABC and they don’t even ask him the question about it.”

March 22, 2021. ‘60 Minutes’ not showing a full answer from Kamala Harris
“The other big news is the fraud committed by ’60 Minutes’ and CBS, together with the Democrat Party, working together with them, which will go down as the single biggest scandal in broadcast history, I predict.”

July 29, 2023. The Biden family’s businesses
“They took in millions. But so much more money pours in. And Joe, he knew all about it. It was a big lie. That was the big lie. This is the biggest scandal in U.S. history and perhaps the world.”

July 9, 2024. Covering up Joe Biden’s decline
“Joe, Kamala, and the entire Democrat establishment have been caught red handed in the thick of the biggest scandal and the biggest cover up. It’s a cover up. That’s what it is. I said it when they hit this guy in the basement and then they cheated on the election.”

Oct. 25, 2024. That hundreds of thousands of children are ‘missing’
“The fake news media doesn’t even talk about it. If that were a Republican instead, it would be the biggest scandal in history. It would be the equivalent of nothing else, and they don’t even talk about it.”

July 16, 2025. Biden’s use of an autopen
“Whoever operated the Autopen had a policy, which is by the way, I think the biggest scandal. That’s the scandal they should be talking about, not Jeffrey Epstein. The scandal you should be talking about is the autopen.”

Honestly, I’m starting to think that the president might be prone to exaggeration.

It was probably inevitable, once Donald Trump returned to the White House, that there would be some formal effort to counteract the facts of the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. Each of Trump’s popular-vote-losing bids for the presidency generated a bespoke conspiracy theory for which Trump demands satisfaction, with the 2016 iteration centering on the idea that his electoral-vote victory was anything other than a landslide.

During the years that followed his first inauguration, Trump became obsessed with dismissing the entire Russia probe as dishonest and political, just as he is obsessed with dismissing the criminal activities into his actions in the same way. Eventually, this fixation centered on prominent Democrats — particularly Hillary Clinton — as the initiators of the investigation.

The well-established reality is that the probe was launched by FBI agents who’d observed both Russian infiltration of the Democratic Party’s network and various pro-Trump actors filtering into Trump’s inner circle. But those FBI agents worked for a Democratic president, Barack Obama, so that’s where Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard aimed her first volley last week.

A press release from Gabbard’s office claims that, “after President Trump won the 2016 election against Hillary Clinton, President Obama and his national security cabinet members manufactured and politicized intelligence to lay the groundwork for what was essentially a years-long coup against President Trump.” Speaking to the right’s most enthusiastic spreader of conspiracy theories, Maria Bartiromo, Gabbard on Sunday claimed that prosecutions were imminent against those who were “trying to steal our democracy” — meaning Obama and his top aides.

This is, in short, ludicrous.

If you want a simple distillation of why, it’s that Gabbard’s claim (and an accompanying memo) depends on cherry-picking isolated comments from the voluminous material that’s been gathered over the course of the Russia investigation. Compare Gabbard’s memo with The Post’s reported timeline of what occurred, for example, and decide for yourself which presents a more robust, credible case.

The slightly more complicated explanation is that Gabbard’s argument relies on a bait-and-switch.

It centers on the idea that, before the election, there was little concern within the intelligence community about Russian cyberactivity having an influence on the outcome. Here’s the first bullet point from the press release:

That bullet point, though, is pulled from one Sept. 9, 2016 email, the full context for which makes clear that the “influence” being discussed centers on election infrastructure; that is, hacking vote-counting machines and the like.

Notice, too, that what’s elided in the DNI quote is that the “probably not trying” language was not final but itself wordsmithing: should they say it probably wouldn’t happen or that they would not be able to?

What Russia was doing, as was already clear at the time of that email, was hacking into computer systems run by political actors and attempting to use the material they found to influence the election. One of the first indictments obtained by Special Counsel Robert Mueller targeted those hackers and explained how the government knew the hacking was done by Russians — something they knew back in June 2016.

For a timeline I created when the indictment landed, I overlaid Mueller’s claim that Russians were Googling translations with where those translated phrases appeared in the initial posts shared the leaked material:

The DNI’s memo shrugs at a pretty important pre-election action by the government: the release of a joint statement from the Obama DNI and DHS warning the public about Russia’s actions.

It noted that “the Russian Government directed the recent compromises of e-mails from US persons and institutions, including from US political organizations,” adding that this was familiar terrain for Russia. Later, the statement specifically suggests that “it would be extremely difficult for someone, including a nation-state actor, to alter actual ballot counts or election results by cyber attack or intrusion” — in other words, making publicly the case that the DNI memo suggests was hidden.

What followed the election was not some scheme to present a public argument that conflicted with what came previously. There were musings, generally from anti-Trump pundits, that Russia had messed with vote-counting or ballots. But the official assertion, bolstered by the evidence gathered by Mueller and his predecessors, was that the influence took the form of poisoning the political conversation with social-media sock puppets (which didn’t do much) and the hacked material (which probably did at least something).

The DNI memo conflates the claim that Russia engaged in “cyber measures” during the 2016 election — which a surfeit of evidence indicates it did — with cyber measures targeting infrastructure, about which the government was always skeptical. It attempts to fool credulous and lazy Trump supporters by insisting that the Obama administration knew that Russia hadn’t engaged in cyberactivity but still concocted a public story that it had. It’s like charging someone with filing a false police report when someone kicked in their door after they insisted that no burglar could jimmy their window.

This is all, to coin a phrase, the administration pulling an Abrego. Trump and his allies want to make a rhetorical point so they contrive a criminal allegation to suggest an otherwise non-existent severity. Never mind that all of this happened a decade ago, which seems likely to fall outside of any conceivable statutes of limitations. And never mind that charging Obama in particular would test the Supreme Court’s broad presentation of immunity to chief executives.

In fairness, Tulsi Gabbard is just doing her job. Unfortunately, that job is “deploying state power on Trump’s behalf, whatever damage to institutional credibility might ensue.” What Gabbard has done, helpfully, is create another litmus test by which one can assess the legitimacy of an observer. If they look at the bowl of picked cherries she offers and determine it is more robust and satisfying than, say, what Mueller produced or that a bipartisan Senate panel compiled? That person should not be considered serious.

For one of my last columns at The Washington Post, I created a timeline of Trump’s interactions with Epstein in order to ensure that I wasn’t missing details. More have emerged since I created this, but I figured I’d share the tool publicly in case it was of use to people. Perhaps I’ll update it in the future. Perhaps not.

November 1992. Video published in 2019 shows Trump and Epstein at Mar-a-Lago, apparently ogling women at a party.

1993 to 1997. Trump flew on Epstein’s private jet at least eight times. Other members of his family often joined him.

Oct. 28, 2002. New York magazine publishes a profile of Epstein in which Trump is quoted: “I’ve known Jeff for fifteen 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. No doubt about it — Jeffrey enjoys his social life.”

July 2006. Epstein is arrested after being indicted on a charge of soliciting prostitution.

June 2008. Having reached an agreement with the office of U.S. Attorney Alex Acosta to avoid federal charges, Epstein pleads guilty to two state charges related to solicitation. He’s released the following year.

Jan. 23, 2015. Gawker publishes the contents of Epstein’s address book, redacting personal contact information. Ivana Trump, Ivanka Trump and Donald Trump’s brother are included — as are 14 numbers associated with Trump himself, including numbers for Melania and Mar-a-Lago.

June 16, 2015. Trump announces his presidential candidacy.

Jan. 20, 2017. Trump becomes president.

April 27. Alex Acosta is confirmed as Trump’s Labor Secretary.

July 6, 2019. Epstein is arrested in New York and charged with sex trafficking minors. The allegations center on the years 2002 through 2005.

Aug. 10, 2019. Epstein takes his own life while detained at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York City.

Nov. 22, 2019. Attorney General William P. Barr attributes Epstein’s death to a “perfect storm of screw-ups.” Two of the guards assigned to Epstein were indicted on charges of falsifying records.

July 2, 2020. Epstein’s longtime confidante Ghislaine Maxwell is charged with conspiring to help Epstein abuse minors. The timeframe of the Maxwell allegations span 1994 to 1997.

July 5. Fox News airs a photo of Epstein and Maxwell in which Trump has been edited out.

Aug. 4. In an interview with Axios, Trump suggests that Epstein might have been killed while in prison. He also says of Ghislaine Maxwell, “Her friend or boyfriend was either killed or committed suicide in jail,” Trump responded. “Yeah, I wish her well. I’d wish you well. I’d wish a lot of people well. Good luck. Let them prove somebody was guilty.” He later adds that “I’m not looking for anything bad for her.”

Jan. 20, 2021. Trump leaves the White House as Joe Biden is inaugurated president.

July 8, 2023. Donald Trump Jr. posts on social media: “Show us all the Epstein client list now!!! Why would anyone protect those scum bags? Ask yourselves this question daily and the answer becomes very apparent!!”

June 3, 2024. In an interview with Fox News, Trump is asked if he would release various information in an effort to rebuild trust with the public. Asked about the “Epstein files,” he says he would. When the interview airs, that’s all that’s shown.

But a version posted to YouTube shows that Trump continued, second-guessing his answer and adding that “you don’t want to affect people’s lives if it’s phony stuff in there, because it’s a lot of phony stuff with that whole world.”

Jan. 20, 2025. Trump is again inaugurated as president.

Feb. 5. Pam Bondi is sworn in as Attorney General.

Feb. 21. Bondi tells Fox News’s John Roberts that a list of Epstein’s clients is “sitting on my desk right now to review.” Several other administration officials, including FBI Director Kash Patel, offer assurances in right-wing media at different times that the evidence will be presented.

Feb. 27. A number of right-wing social media influencers are invited to the White House and given binder purporting to be Epstein files. The documents are mostly ones that were already public, including those published by Gawker a decade prior.

March 3. Bondi tells Fox News host Sean Hannity that a “truckload of evidence arrived.” She says is is “in the possession of the FBI” and that FBI Director Kash Patel will create a report about the evidence.

May 19. In an appearance on Fox News, Patel and Bongino assert that Epstein took his own life. A furor erupts on the right.

June 5. Elon Musk posts on social media: “Time to drop the really big bomb: @realDonaldTrump is in the Epstein files. That is the real reason they have not been made public. Have a nice day, DJT!”

July 7. The Justice Department releases a memo stating that there is no “client list” included among Epstein’s files. It also releases video showing that no one entered Epstein’s cell before his 2019 death. Many Trump supporters again express frustration about the lack of revelations.

July 11. Stoked by Trump ally Laura Loomer, rumors swirl about dissent within the Justice Department over the handling of the Epstein case.

Wired reports that even the “raw” Epstein cell video has been edited. A missing minute of footage from immediately before midnight is attributed by the Justice Department to a glitch in the recording software.

July 12. In a lengthy post on Truth Social, Trump claims that the “Epstein files” were “written by Obama, Crooked Hillary, Comey, Brennan” and members of the Biden administration. He also defends Bondi.