Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard railed against reporters for daring to point out the obvious inconsistencies in her claims that Barack Obama masterminded a treasonous conspiracy against President Donald Trump.
Gabbard has accused the former president of manufacturing intelligence about Russia’s interference in the 2016 election—claims that Obama dismissed as an attempt to distract from the president’s Jeffrey Epstein woes.
Speaking to reporters at the White House on Wednesday, Gabbard provided apparent “evidence” to support her accusations, but was met with some uncomfortable questions about the details and the timing of her claims.
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One journalist asked why Gabbard’s claims contradicted a massive bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee report that concluded in 2020 that Russia had “engaged in an aggressive, multi-faceted effort to influence, or attempt to influence, the outcome of the 2016 presidential election” in Trump’s favor.
“Look at the evidence, and you will know the truth,” Gabbard replied cryptically.
She also couldn’t answer why these supposed revelations did not come to light during Trump’s first term in office from 2017 to 2021.
But one thing she did know, apparently, was that the journalists’ questions were a “disservice” to the American people, she told Fox News host Jesse Watters on Wednesday.
“I was standing in the White House press briefing room, and hearing some of these crazy questions being asked by members of the media who are trying to distract and deflect away from the historic exposé that we have brought forward, that once again puts into question the American people’s ability to trust the integrity of our democratic republic,” she told Watters.
During the press briefing, she especially took issue with a question about the administration conflating two separate issues: whether Russia hacked voting machines, versus its broader election interference.
The intelligence community has ruled out the former but confirmed the latter, according to every major inquiry.
Speaking to Watters, Gabbard nevertheless accused the White House press pool journalists of being “similar to the deep state actors who’ve been trying to stop us from releasing this,” saying members of the media were “complicit” in the Russia “hoax” from the beginning.
She specifically ranted against The Washington Post’s award-winning national security reporter Ellen Nakashima, accusing her of “harassing” members of the intelligence community by calling them on burner phones and trying to ask “harassing questions.”
“By the way, [Nakashima] went on to win a Pulitzer prize because for years she was so good at lying and not telling the truth to the American people that they gave her an award for it,” Gabbard said. “These people are still here.”
It was a strange call-out considering Nakashima doesn’t appear to have attended Wednesday’s White House press briefing, and if she did, she didn’t ask a question.
Nakashima was a member of the Post’s Pulitzer prize-winning teams in 2022 for investigating the January 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol, 2018 for digging into Moscow’s efforts to influence the 2016 election, and 2014 for exploring the hidden scope National Security Agency surveillance.
Earlier this month, she reported that Gabbard’s team had requested access to emails and chat logs from the U.S.’s major spy agencies in an apparent attempt to make sure intelligence officials were sufficiently loyal to Trump and his agenda.
The request startled senior officials, who have resisted turning over the data, Nakashima wrote.
Perhaps Gabbard is still smarting over that report, or maybe her call-out means a new scoop is coming soon.
