emptywheel: Tulsi Gabbard Teams Up with Russian Spies to Wiretap and Unmask Hillary Clinton

Long and filled with details.

"I joked the other day, that it’s as if Trump offered his cabinet members a free condo – for whomever best distracted from his Epstein problem. Tulsi Gabbard is, thus far, winning the contest – for the sheer shamelessness of her ridiculous claims."

— Multi Facet Fables (@multifacetfables.bsky.social) 2025-07-25T05:36:54.152Z

Tulsi Gabbard Teams Up with Russian Spies to Wiretap and Unmask Hillary Clinton

https://www.emptywheel.net/2025/07/24/tulsi-gabbard-teams-up-with-russian-spies-to-wiretap-and-unmask-hillary-clinton/

July 24, 2025/12 Comments/in emptywheel /by emptywheel

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She (Gabbard) has manufactured claims of sedition out of her conflation — whether deliberate or insanely ignorant — of voting machines and the DNC server, built on top of President Obama’s perfectly reasonable request to document all the ways Russia tampered in the 2016 election. Then, she released a different report — a 2020 GOP HPSCI report complaining about Intelligence Community tradecraft in the 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment. The HPSCI Report not only exhibits all the tradecraft failure it complains about, but it conflicts in some ways with her original propaganda.

In a presser at the White House yesterday (skip ahead to 12:30), Tulsi went one better, presenting the contents of the HPSCI report without context, focusing closely on a section that cites a cherrypicked selection of Russian intelligence reports purportedly (but not certainly) based off documents stolen from Democrats, the State Department, and a think tank.

Tulsi stood at the podium of the White House press room and delivered Russian intelligence, with an occasional “allegedly” thrown in, without explaining clearly that’s what she was doing.

In so doing, the Director of National Intelligence effectively teamed up with Russian spies, parroting analysis those Russian spies did on documents stolen from Hillary and people associated with her, without masking Hillary’s identity as required by intelligence protocol. This is precisely the kind of (then unsubstantiated) abuse that first animated right wing grievance back in 2017, outrage over the possible politicized unmasking of political adversaries, carried out by the head of intelligence from the White House podium.

They have become the monsters they warned about.