MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
President Trump was asked about the Epstein case yesterday. Rather than talk about that, he pivoted to a nearly 8-year-old controversy, Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Trump's director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, said last week that she had released proof that President Obama and his national security officials had manipulated intelligence to go after Trump. Here's Trump talking about Obama yesterday.
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PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: It's there. He's guilty. They - this was treason. This was every word you can think of. They tried to steal the election.
MARTIN: We're joined by NPR cybersecurity correspondent Jenna McLaughlin to tell us more about this. Good morning, Jenna.
JENNA MCLAUGHLIN, BYLINE: Good morning, Michel.
MARTIN: So can you explain exactly what the Office of the Director of National Intelligence has published?
MCLAUGHLIN: Yes. So there's two new publications. The first is a document collating a little over a hundred pages of newly declassified Obama-era emails. These were exchanged in the lead up to the 2016 election and afterwards. And then there's a timeline of events with some annotation and notes. Gabbard has been sharing a lot of her conclusions about those materials across social media and on TV.
MARTIN: So you can read through those documents. You've been reading through those documents. What is the gist of what they say?
MCLAUGHLIN: I have. Many of the emails are focused on the question of whether Russian hackers had or could successfully hack the election. By that I mean cyberattacks, changing voting tallies at scale, taking over voting machines, things like that. Obama administration national security officials from several different agencies said it was probably unlikely that Russian hackers could breach election infrastructure on a large scale, at least not without being detected. Then, in 2017, right after the election that was won by President Trump, Obama asked the intelligence community to come up with an assessment on everything that they knew about Russian interference in that election cycle. Within that assessment, the intelligence community concluded that Russia did attempt to influence the election and American voters' confidence about it. Now, Gabbard argues they changed their tune after Obama's request. Here. Listen to her talk about it on Fox News.
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TULSI GABBARD: So creating this piece of manufactured intelligence that claims that Russia had helped Donald Trump get elected contradicted every other assessment that had been made previously in the months leading up to the election that said exactly the opposite - that Russia neither had neither the intent nor the capability to try to quote-unquote hack the United States election for the presidency of the United States.
MARTIN: Do those emails actually say that? Is there actually a contradiction with the 2017 intelligence assessment?
MCLAUGHLIN: Honestly, they really don't say that. Gabbard appears to be conflating two separate things. The intelligence officials who wrote this report never said that Russia hacked the election. They said that Russia had attempted to influence the election, using disinformation on social media, hack and leak campaigns of the Clinton camp's emails, bot farms, things like that - all things that have been made public over the years. It's hard to measure exactly what impact those campaigns had even to this day, but experts do broadly agree with the conclusions made back in 2017.
MARTIN: Yes, we've been hearing about this for a long time. So what's been the reaction to these new claims?
MCLAUGHLIN: President Trump and his supporters are touting it as a major revelation. But notably, a representative for President Obama offered a rare response. He called the claims outrageous. He said nothing that Gabbard published contradicts the conclusions from 2017. And finally, he noted that back in 2020, the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee, then led by President Trump's secretary of state, Marco Rubio, affirmed those very claims.
MARTIN: That was NPR's Jenna McLaughlin. Jenna, thank you.
MCLAUGHLIN: Thanks, Michel. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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