Ex-CIA agent hits back at Tulsi Gabbard after she accused Obama of ‘treasonous conspiracy’ against Trump | US politics

A former CIA officer who helped direct intelligence assessments on an alleged interference from Russia in the 2016 presidential election, said Tulsi Gabbard, director of national intelligence, was unaware of spying practices after accused Barack Obama and his national “betrayal” security team against Donald Trump.

Susan Miller, head of counter-intelligence of the agency at the time of the elections, told the Guardian that Gabbard’s allegations were based on false declarations and the basic discoveries of discoveries made by the Miller team on Russian actions, which she insisted that were based on multiple sources of confidence and verification.

Gabbard accused Obama and his former national security officials of “manufacturing” intelligence to reveal that the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, had intervened on the side of Trump when they knew it was false. The objective, she insisted, was to make the electoral victory of Trump illegitimate, thus throwing the base of a “coup of several years against him”.

She transmitted the case to Pam Bondi, the Attorney General, who announced last week a “strike force” in the case. However, reports suggested that Bondi had been caught by Gabbard’s request that his department examines the issue.

Gabbard called for criminal proceedings against many officials involved, including Obama himself.

Obama last week denounced allegations as “scandalous and ridiculous”, and part of an attempt to distract the attention of Jeffrey Epstein’s files, in which Trump’s name would appear.

Until Wednesday, none of the other senior high -level officials appointed in the recent Gabbard report – including James Clapper, his predecessor as national intelligence director; John Brennan, the former director of the CIA; Or the former director of the FBI, James Comey – had responded publicly to his allegations. Clapper and Brennan broke their silence for the first time Wednesday with an advertising article written jointly in the New York Times in which they called the allegations of Gabbard “manifestly false” and accused him of “rewriting[ing] history”.

In an interview, Miller – who is not appointed in the public account of the national intelligence director – questioned Gabbard’s understanding of intelligence issues.

Gabbard, who has never worked on the Chamber’s intelligence committee when she was a member of the Congress, criticized the “professions” of the agents who compiled the evaluation of Russia’s electoral activities.

“Has she met a Russian agent?” Asked Miller, a 39 -year -old veteran who served tours as CIA chief abroad. “Did she already give diamonds to a Russian who gives us, do you know?” Has she already worked in the streets of Moscow to make a dead fall? Has she already managed an agent?

“No. She never did all this. She clearly does not understand that.”

Miller told The Guardian that she was speaking because Gabbard’s statements had struck her work and that of his team of eight members who worked on the Russia affair.

“My reputation and the reputation of my team are at stake,” she said. “Tulsi comes out and does not use my name, does not use the names of the people of my team, but essentially says that all of this was false and compensated, and this.”

Miller and his former team members recently hired lawyers to defend themselves against charges that could put them in prison.

Miller hired Mark Zaid, an eminent Washington defense lawyer to represent her.

The scenario takes up a situation that it was confronted with in 2017, when – still a service agent – Miller hired a lawyer of $ 1,500 to represent her after being informed that she could face criminal charges for her role in carrying out the same intelligence report now examined by Gabbard.

Investigators interviewed her up to eight hours as part of a punishment to find possible ruins of the Obama law who ultimately led to Bill Barr, the Attorney General of Trump’s first administration, appointing a special lawyer, John Durham, to conduct an investigation into the FBI investigation into the links between the Trump and Russia campaign.

“They asked for things like:” Who told you to write this and who told you to draw these conclusions? “” Remember Miller.

“I said to them:” No one did. If someone had told us to draw certain conclusions, we would have all left. There is no way, all of us never had the reputation of falsifying anything, before anything or after. “”

No accusation was made against her, but she was not informed either that the case had been classified.

Durham’s report in 2023 concluded that the FBI should never have launched its complete investigation, entitled “Crossfire Hurricane” in the so-called Trump-Russia links. But his four -year investigation was in a way a disappointment for Trump and his supporters, providing only three criminal proceedings, causing a single conviction – of an FBI lawyer who admitted having changed an email to support a surveillance request.

It is this reason which is now covered by Gabbard in what could be a offer of inspiration from Trump for “remuneration” against the political enemies that he accused of having submitted it to a hunt for political witch.

But the crusade, says Miller, is supported by false premises – that the conclusions of interference of Russia were a “hoax”, a description long adopted by Trump and repeated by Gabbard in his report of July 18.

“It’s not a hoax,” she said. “It was based on real intelligence. This reports that we obtain verified agents and other verified flows of intelligence.

“It was so clear [the Russians] did this, that it was never in question in 2016. It is only a problem now because Tulsi wants it to be. »»

The news journalists of the White House last week, Gabbard cited a report by the intelligence committee of the House of Representatives in 2020 – supported only by its Republican members – claiming that Putin’s objective in the elections was to “undermine the faith in the American democratic process, showing no preference for a certain candidate”.

Miller rejected this. “The information led us to the right conclusion that [the interference] was in favor of Trump-the republican party and Trump’s favor, “she said.

Rebounding the suggestions that she or her team could be guilty of a pro-democratic bias, she said that she was a recorded republican voter. His team was made up of Republicans, Democrats and “centrists,” she said.

Gabbard said the agents had undergone pressure on the instigation of Obama – in the manufacture of information in the weeks following Trump’s victory, to raise questions about his electoral legitimacy and weaken his presidency.

“BS [bullshit]. This is not true, “said Miller.” It had to do with our sources and what they found. It had nothing to do with Obama telling us to do so. We found it, and we are like, what do we do with that?

At the heart of Gabbard’s criticism are two statements which, according to Miller, confuse distinct problems.

One is based on briefing media reports of Obama administration managers a month after Trump’s victory, one of which stating that Russia used “cyber-products” to influence “the outcome of the election”. Gabbard writes that this is contradicted by the admission of Obama that there was no “proof of [voting] Falsified machines “to modify the statement of votes, which means that the possible conclusion of the evaluation of the Russian interference must be false.

Miller rejects this as a red herring, because the evaluation of the CIA – ultimately approved by other intelligence agencies – has never been based on electoral machines hacking.

“This is not that [the Russians] were trying to do so, “she said.” They were trying to do so thanks to a secret action of press documents, internet parts, things like that. The DNC [Democratic National Committee] hack [when Russian hackers also penetrated the emails of Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta, and passed them to WikiLeaks] … East [also] part of it.

“This is why we came out with the conclusion that 100% the Russians tried to influence the election on the part of Trump,” [but] 100%, unless we have questioned each voter, we cannot say if it worked. If we knew something on the electoral machines, it would have been a very different thing. »»

Miller also refuted Gabbard’s assertion that the “level of confidence” of the intelligence community in Russian interference had been reinforced by “more additional information” which turned out to be an undeclared file written by Christopher Steele, a former intelligence officer, who suggested a possible collusion between Russia and Trump.

“We have never used the Steele file in our report,” she said. The file – which included Salaces allegations concerning Trump and Russian sex workers – created a media sensation during its publication without authorization in the days of January 2017 before the inauguration of Trump.

Miller said that this had only been included in an annex to the intelligence assessment published in the same month on the insistence of Comey, the director of the FBI, who had said to his CIA counterpart Brennan, that the office would not sign the rest of the report if it were excluded.

“We have never seen it until our report was finished at 99.99% and about to print. We don’t care about it or don’t really understand it or where it came from. It was too badly written and not compressed.

“But we were told that it was to be included or that the FBI does not approve of our report. It was therefore put as an admission with a huge cover sheet, written by me and a member of the team, which said something like:` `We attach this document, the Steele file, to this report at that time ”.”