The Obama administration, however, never claimed that Russian cyberattacks impacted the election results. “I can assure the public that there was not the kind of tampering with the voting process that was of concern … the votes that were cast were counted — they were counted appropriately,” Obama said from the White House, days after receiving the December 2016 brief to which Gabbard referred.
The Obama White House said that Russia sought to interfere in the campaign by leaking hacked documents and using bots and troll farms to spread misinformation about the election — a finding that was later backed by special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation and a Senate report.
Another special counsel, appointed by then-Attorney General Bill Barr and championed by Trump, investigated claims that the Russia-related investigations were politicized for over three years. John Durham's report was critical of the FBI's handling of the probe, saying that it found senior "FBI personnel displayed a serious lack of analytical rigor toward the information they received" — but nothing to the level of criminality now alleged by Trump.
The Senate report, meanwhile, was unequivocal about Russia's actions.
“The Committee’s bipartisan Report found that Russia’s goal in its unprecedented hack-and-leak operation against the United States in 2016, among other motives, was to assist the Trump Campaign. Candidate Trump and his Campaign responded to that threat by embracing, encouraging, and exploiting the Russian effort," the report said.
Democratic lawmakers said the administration is trying to rewrite history in order to assuage Trump.
“This is 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,” Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., said in a statement.
House Democratic Caucus Chair Pete Aguilar of California told NBC News on Monday that “it’s all a distraction."
"[T]hey’ll release anything if it buys them another day or two to not talk about Epstein or to get the angry mob to talk about Epstein,” Aguilar said.
The Russia investigation is only one of a number of old grievances that Trump has revived in recent days while coping with backlash from MAGA supporters about the handling of the Epstein case.
Trump has used his Truth Social platform to accuse his old foe Sen. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., of breaking the law and shared AI-generated mug shots of various Democratic officials who've been Republican bogeymen over the years.
The Justice Department, meanwhile, released thousands of files related to Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination on Monday and announced it had sent a redacted report to Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, about the FBI’s handling of files related to “former-FBI Director James Comey’s failed investigation into Hillary Clinton’s mishandling of highly classified information” during Clinton’s time as secretary of state.