The Obama-Russia bait-and-switch

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.