In mid-July, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard released a trove of documents that, she said, showed evidence that Obama administration intelligence officials “manufactured and politicized intelligence to lay the groundwork” for investigation into alleged Russian election meddling during the 2016 presidential campaign and Russia’s alleged support for Donald Trump.
The Russia Gate scandal helped recreate a Cold War political atmosphere that fueled support for the U.S.-led proxy war on Russia via Ukraine that has cost more than a million lives.
Rather than harming Trump, Russia Gate has helped bolster Trump’s political fortunes by giving him the ability to claim that he was a “victim” of the machinations of the “deep state” that wanted to bring him down.
The ineptitude of the Democrats makes it appear that the whole Russia Gate saga was part of a manufactured spectacle by the ruling oligarchy designed to further polarize Americans along partisan lines and create a hero out of Trump—whose regressive economic program serves the 1%—all while building up public support for the war in Ukraine.[1]
Following Gabbard’s revelations, Trump issued a fake video from a TikTok blogger depicting Trump and Obama sitting in the Oval Office and FBI officers handcuffing Obama while Trump laughs.[2]
Trump additionally shared an AI-generated image on X (formerly Twitter) attributed to “sirtemplemount” that showed fake mugshots of Obama and officials from his administration with the words “The Shady Bunch.”
Sirtemplemount wrote that “Obama promised hope and change—delivered surveillance at home and abroad, secret drone strikes, and destabilized regions from Libya to Syria. The media cheered, but history won’t forget the scandals buried under a Nobel Peace Prize. Accountability was never on the agenda.”
While this latter assessment is well-grounded,[3] any objective analysis of U.S. politics would have to acknowledge that Trump has committed equally egregious crimes as Obama, and that Obama is not the only rotten leader in recent history whose associates deserve to be in jail.
Successor to the Mythic WMDs
Though exploited for political gain, the Gabbard documents provide evidence that the threat of Russian election interference was intentionally over-hyped—much like the threat of WMDs that led to war in Iraq.[4]
One document from then-Director of National Intelligence (DNI) James Clapper, dated August 31, 2016, rendered the conclusion that “there is no indication of a Russian threat to directly manipulate the actual vote count through cyber means.”
In another document, dated September 2, 2016, a top intelligence official asks for a “softening of rhetoric” about Russia’s intent because he/she says that the way [the intelligence briefing] currently reads, it would “indicate that we have definitive information that Russia does intend to disrupt our elections and we are uncomfortable making that assessment at this point.”
An additional email by Clapper stated that “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.’”
These documents contradict claims by Obama administration officials in late 2016 and early 2017 about Russian election interference and Russia’s supposed support for Donald Trump.[5]
A confidential 2020 report prepared by the House Committee on Intelligence released by Gabbard on July 24 concluded that U.S. intelligence agency judgments of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s intentions during the election failed to adhere to sound analytical standards.
The assessment noted that “one scant, unclear and unverifiable fragment of a sentence from [a] substandard report constitutes the only classified information cited to suggest Putin aspired to help Trump win.”
The intelligence community assessment additionally “ignored or selectively quoted reliable intelligence reports that challenged and in some cases undermined judgments that Putin sought to elect Trump.”[6]
These reports specified Putin’s feeling that neither Clinton nor Trump could correct the strained relationship” between the U.S. and Russia, or overcome “strong anti-Russian political sentiment in Washington.”
They also specified that Putin had information about Clinton’s alleged health problems and alleged psycho-emotional and anger-management issues that led to use of tranquilizers, which he chose not to publicly reveal.[7]
Right after the 2016 election, the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies had stated that they had “high confidence”—but not certainty—that Putin favored Trump in the election.
A key thrust of the allegation about election interference centered on the Russians’ supposedly hacking Democratic National Committee (DNC) emails and leaking them to Wikileaks in an attempt to make Hillary Clinton look bad.
A 2017 study carried out by the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) found that the DNC documents were actually leaked from within the U.S.—and not hacked from within Russia, which would have been impossible based on the speed of the modem.
The VIPS additionally determined that social media posts attributed to a Kremlin-linked company had zero impact on the election and were not likely initiated by the Kremlin. Most of these posts occurred after the election and did not exhibit preference for any particular candidate.
Highly problematic was the intelligence community’s reliance on a cyber-security firm, CrowdStrike, that was hired by the Clinton campaign, and on a dossier produced by a British MI6 agent, Christopher Steele, that was based on second hand rumor and hearsay.
In December 2017, CrowdStrike President Shawn Henry testified before Congress that his firm “did not have concrete evidence” that Russian hackers had exfiltrated data from DNC servers.
Obama as Russia Gate Godfather
According to Gabbard, Obama played a pivotal role in Russia Gate by ordering the intelligence community to create a more alarmist assessment after he was given intelligence reports dismissing Russian election meddling.
Gabbard said that on December 9, 2016, Obama led a White House meeting with CIA Director Brennan, FBI Director Comey, DNI Clapper, then-National Security Adviser Susan Rice, Secretary of State John Kerry, Assistant Secretary Victoria Nuland and others, where he directed the IC (Intelligence Community) to “create a new intelligence assessment that detailed Russian election meddling, even though it would contradict multiple intelligence assessments released over the previous several months.”
After this meeting, Clapper’s office scrambled to piece together an assessment, based largely on the discredited Steele dossier, which was released on January 6, 2017.[8]
When a whistleblower came forward to question all this, the whistleblower was shunned and then pressured to support Clapper’s misleading report.
Obama’s motives appear to have been to a) try to delegitimize Trump’s election victory; and b) whip up anti-Russia hysteria that could help facilitate public support for heightened military aid to Ukraine and the new Cold War.
The latter follows an old formula used by American leaders throughout the original Cold War.[9]
After abandoning its Russian reset policy, the Obama administration initiated a coup in Ukraine in February 2014 that triggered conflict with Russia, and provided extensive military aid to Ukraine’s post-coup government, which attacked the people of eastern Ukraine who voted for their autonomy following the coup.
Mark Warner and Senate Intelligence Committee Disinformation
Following the release of the first batch of Gabbard’s documents, Senator Mark Warner (D-VA) issued a statement asserting that the Senate Intelligence Committee had conducted a bipartisan investigation (in 2020) reviewing hundreds of thousands of documents and interviewing witnesses, which concluded that “Russia interfered in the 2016 election to benefit Donald Trump.”[10]
This latter conclusion resulted from the belief that Russia was behind the hack of DNC emails, which was disproven by the VIPS and by British diplomat Craig Murray who met in a wooded area in Washington, D.C., with an associate of the leaker who was identified as a disgruntled DNC employee.
Murray told The Daily Mail that none of the leaks “came from the Russians. The source had legal access to the information. The documents came from inside leaks, not hacks.” [11]
The newly declassified House Intelligence Committee report specified that the FBI and NSA expressed only “low confidence” that Russia was behind the hack and release of Democratic Party emails, and that U.S. intelligence agencies “lack[ed] sufficient technical details” to link the stolen Democratic Party material released by WikiLeaks and other sources “to Russian state-sponsored actors.”[12]
The 2020 Senate intelligence committee report had defamed WikiLeaks by accusing it of having been given the hacked emails by the Russians.
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange told journalist John Pilger that “the Clinton camp has been able to project a neo-McCarthyist hysteria that Russia is responsible for everything,’ ‘Hillary Clinton has stated multiple times, falsely, that 17 US intelligence agencies had assessed that Russia was the source of our publications. That’s false—we can say that the Russian government is not the source.”’[13]
Eroded Trust in Intelligence Agencies
Mark Warner tried to turn the tables by saying that Gabbard was the one trying to “weaponize her position” by “amplifying the president’s election conspiracy theories,” and that it was “appalling” to hear DNI Gabbard “accuse her own IC [intelligence community] workforce of committing a ‘treasonous conspiracy’ when she was unwilling to label Edward Snowden a traitor.”
Warner went on to claim that Gabbard’s public proclamations were “just another example of the DNI trying to cook the books, rewrite history, and erode trust in the intelligence agencies she’s supposed to be leading.”[14]
In reality, the erosion of trust in U.S. intelligence agencies has little to do with Gabbard, but is the consequence of a long-standing pattern of deceit that goes back decades.
Exposure of Billionaire Con Man Who Helped Trigger Cold War 2.0
The release of the Gabbard documents undercutting the dominant narrative of the new Cold War coincided with the publication of an article in The Realist Review by investigative reporter Lucy Komisar showing that the original U.S. sanctions policy targeting Russia was rooted in deceit.
Komisar has had a distinguished journalistic career going back to her reporting on the civil rights movement in Mississippi in the early 1960s.
In the last decade, she has written some important scoops on William F. Browder, a billionaire hedge-fund owner who profited from the privatization of Russian state-owned industry in the 1990s, and used his deep pockets to lobby for passage of the Magnitsky sanctions act on Russia that was signed by President Obama in December 2012 and helped kick-start Cold War 2.0.
The official story advanced by Browder was that Sergei Magnitsky was a lawyer who had uncovered a scam by the Russian government to defraud his company, Hermitage Capital, of $230 million and that Magnitsky was murdered by Russian authorities in Butyrka Prison in Moscow after he had become a whistleblower.
Komisar builds off a censored film produced by Andrei Nekrasov to show that Browder’s story is a complete lie.
Magnitsky was neither a lawyer nor a whistleblower. Rather, he was an accountant specializing in helping the wealthy to offshore their money and avoid paying taxes who was cooperating with the Russian authorities in their investigation of Browder’s fraudulent business practices.
Instead of being beaten to death by prison guards, as Browder alleges, Magnitsky died from health ailments that were exacerbated by medical neglect in prison—something that is all too common in U.S., as well as Russian, prisons.[15]
Komisar points out that, when Magnitsky was in prison, Browder never publicized his plight or tried to mobilize any public support for him. He only raised an outcry after Magnitsky’s death when it was expedient for him—as he was in the process of being investigated by the Russian government, which charged him and convicted him in absentia for tax evasion.
Attempting to illegally obtain shares of Russia’s leading oil and gas producers, Gazprom, Browder had tried to make himself seem like a victim of the Russian government, when, in fact, he defrauded it of $230 million in just one of his tax scams.
Browder had started his career working for legendary British spy Robert Maxwell, Ghislaine Maxwell’s father.[16] His mentor, Edmond Safra, was a “Bronfman syndicate man” according to Komisar, who owned a bank that was used as a conduit for CIA black operations, including Watergate.
Browder’s lobbying influence was carried out through Senator Ben Cardin (D-MD), whose election campaigns Browder covertly helped fund through Ziff Brothers Investments.
Browder hired as a lobbyist Dick Cheney’s former press secretary, Juleanna Glover, who got him a meeting with John McCain (R-AZ), who agreed to sponsor the Magnitsky Act with other Washington power figures.
Browder’s story is significant along with the new Russia Gate documents in pointing to the fact that much of the anti-Russia hysteria driving the new Cold War has been manufactured for political and self-serving purposes by unscrupulous individuals.
Browder is a brilliant con man who has been able to manipulate public opinion and buy political influence with his deep pockets.
The Magnitsky Act sanctions have been followed up by legions of other sanctions based on fraudulent pretexts, including the fake Skripal and Alexei Navalny poisoning stories and false allegations that Russia was behind the downing of a civilian airliner (MH-17).
The American public has been susceptible to all the disinformation because of a deep-rooted Russophobia, which has born poisonous fruits.
Critics of U.S. foreign policy amidst this climate could now conveniently be called “Putin lovers” and Russian assets. Those seeking to investigate the real-life abuses of the “deep state” and opposed the billions of dollars in aid to Ukraine were now also branded as “MAGA cultists” or Trump defenders or “conspiracy theorists.” ↑
Gabbard said she referred the new documents to the Department of Justice for a potential criminal investigation. ↑
See Jeremy Kuzmarov, Obama’s Unending Wars: Fronting the Foreign Policy of the Permanent Warfare State (Atlanta: Clarity Press, 2019) for more details. ↑
For good analysis of the significance of the new documents, see Aaron Mate, “US intel hid high-level doubts about “Russian interference”, docs reveal,” Substack, July 23, 2025. ↑
Gabbard said, “This intelligence was weaponized…. It was used as a justification for endless smears, for sanctions from Congress, and for covert investigations.” She added: “When key internal assessments found that Russia ‘did not impact recent U.S. election results,’ those findings were suppressed.”
A veteran CIA officer said that Intelligence agency reports supposedly proving Russian election interference contained “substandard information that was unclear, of uncertain origin. potentially biased, implausible, or in the words of senior operations officers, odd.” Putin made no positive references to Trump and a preoccupation of Russian officials and analysts was that neither Trump or Clinton would “respect Russia’s strategic interests or treat Russia as an equal on the world stage.” ↑
Clinton allegedly suffered from type-2 diabetes, deep-vein thrombosis and pulmonary and heart disease. She displayed uncontrolled fits of anger, aggression and cheerfulness, which resulted in her being put on tranquilizers. It was reported that the Russian intelligence services (FSB) had amassed information that Clinton secretly met with U.S. religious organizations and that State Department officials offered significant State Department increases in funding for them in exchange for them supporting Clinton. Whether the FSB and Putin actually had all this information and whether it is all true is hard to definitively discern. ↑
The assessment was titled “Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent U.S. Elections.” ↑
A key underlying motive in both contexts was to weaken Russia as a potential geopolitical rival to the U.S. In the new Cold War, Ukraine has been used as a base to attack Russia directly. ↑
The investigation was chaired by Marco Rubio (R-FL) and co-chaired by Warner. ↑
The DNC whistleblower is thought to be Seth Rich who was murdered under suspicious circumstances. U.S. intelligence agencies claimed that Guccifer 2.0 and another website, DCleaks.com were controlled by Russia, though newly disclosed documents show that U.S. intelligence actually only had “moderate confidence” that they were under direct Russian government control. VIPS member Bill Binney told Consortium News that Guccifer 2.0 was actually the creation of CIA Director John Brennan. ↑
The New York Times reported that intelligence agencies and Senate investigators who spent years reviewing the matter concluded that, while the Russians had conducted probing operations of election systems and extracted voter registration data in Illinois and Arizona during the 2016 election, there was “no evidence that Moscow’s hackers attempted to actually change votes.” VIPS founder Ray McGovern told Consortium News that if the Russians had hacked DNC emails, the NSA would have known about it. McGovern further pointed out that Shawn Henry’s testimony before Congress was suppressed by Adam Schiff (D-CA) for over two years and never reported on by the U.S. media. He also said that if the Russians had hacked DNC emails, the National Security Agency (NSA) would have known about it. For a profile of McGovern and his prescience in dissecting the Russia Gate narrative from early on, see here. ↑
Craig Murray told The London Daily Mail: ‘I don’t understand why the CIA would say the information came from Russian hackers when they must know that isn’t true. Regardless of whether the Russians hacked into the DNC, the documents Wikileaks published did not come from that.’” The Senate intelligence committee report presented no evidence to back up its claims about Wikileaks, and much else. Randy Credico, a comedian and radio host was accused of being Roger Stone’s “backchannel” to Wikileaks, a charge Credico strenuously denied when subpoenaed by both the House Intelligence Committee and Robert Mueller. ↑
Senate intelligence committee chairman Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) is trying now, in response to Gabbard’s allegations, to undercut Gabbard and the DNI’s influence and to put all power in the intelligence agencies with the CIA. ↑
There was no sign that Magnitsky died a violent death. An alternative theory is that Browder paid off assassins who killed Magnitsky in prison. The Russian government could not have murdered Magnitsky and had no motive to do so as he was cooperating with them in the case against Browder. Because he was a prized informant in that case, the Russian government had every reason to keep Magnitsky alive and not kill him. Oleg Lurie, a journalist who was imprisoned because a corrupt Duma member had accused him of extortion, said that Magnitsky had told him that his employers (led by Browder) were selling him out and asking him to sign documents he did not want to sign. This goes against Browder’s claim to be Magnitsky’s champion and gatekeeper of his legacy. ↑
Maxwell was also suspected of being an Israeli Mossad agent. Browder’s grandfather Earl Browder was ironically Chairman of the Communist Party USA from 1934-1945. ↑
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About the Author
Jeremy Kuzmarov holds a Ph.D. in American history from Brandeis University and has taught at numerous colleges across the United States. He is regularly sought out as an expert on U.S. history and politics for radio and TV programs and co-hosts a radio show on New York Public Radio and on Progressive Radio News Network called “Uncontrolled Opposition.” He is Managing Editor of CovertAction Magazine and is the author of six books on U.S. foreign policy, including Obama’s Unending Wars (Clarity Press, 2019), The Russians Are Coming, Again, with John Marciano (Monthly Review Press, 2018), Warmonger. How Clinton’s Malign Foreign Policy Launched the U.S. Trajectory From Bush II to Biden (Clarity Press, 2023); and with Dan Kovalik, Syria: Anatomy of Regime Change (Baraka Books, 2025). Besides these books, Kuzmarov has published hundreds of articles and contributed to numerous edited volumes, including one in the prestigious Oxford History of Counterinsurgency . He can be reached at jkuzmarov2@gmail.com and found on substack here.
Fake news obviously had some impact on the election. It is difficult to quantify but certainly it had some impact as shown in the attached article: It would be very stupid to say that fake news had zero impact on the election. It would be a gross under hype.
https://faculty.lsu.edu/fakenews/elections/sixteen.php