Fact-checking three of Tulsi Gabbard’s attacks on Obama about Russian election interference

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard said she uncovered evidence that directly points to former President Barack Obama "leading the manufacturing of this intelligence assessment" about Russia’s involvement in the 2016 U.S. election.

Gabbard based her July 23 statements on documents she declassified in July, including government emails and reports by intelligence officials during the final months of Obama’s presidency and a House committee report written by Republicans in 2017 and updated in 2020. Gabbard called for a criminal investigation, and the Justice Department announced a new "strike force" to evaluate the information.

The gist of Gabbard’s argument is that Obama knew the intelligence community had concluded that Russia could not and did not alter votes, but he wanted an assessment that said Russia did interfere. 

But Gabbard oversimplifies the situation with Russian election interference in 2016. "Interference" is a broad word. It was not merely a question about whether Russia would alter votes and the election’s outcome — which did not happen. 

Russian interference in 2016 included hacking the Democratic National Committee and the campaign of Hillary Clinton, the Democratic presidential nominee who lost to Donald Trump, and spreading propaganda. That interference was designed to sow discord and election distrust. 

Interference by Russia was not a conclusion only on the political left. Multiple in-depth reviews reached the same conclusion, including a 2020 bipartisan Senate committee chaired by then Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., who is now secretary of state.

Here, we fact-check three of Gabbard’s statements.

President Donald Trump and former President Barack Obama talk as they pause on the steps of the East Front of the U.S. Capitol as the Obamas depart, Jan. 20, 2017, in Washington, D.C.. (AP)

Before the 2016 election, "The intelligence community had one assessment, that Russia did not have the intent or capability to try to impact the outcome of the U.S. election." Fox News, July 22

This is misleading. Intelligence officials’ predictions before the election were not cut and dried. The emails show some back and forth among intelligence officials in different agencies in the months preceding Election Day.

While the emails show they thought it unlikely Russia could subvert election results, they expressed broad concern about interference.

On Aug. 31, 2016, an official wrote that a team was working with the Central Intelligence Agency on a President’s Daily Brief submission — an intelligence report prepared for the president and top officials — on the threat. 

"The thrust of the analysis is that there is no indication of a Russian threat to directly manipulate the actual vote count through cyber means," the official wrote. "However, as seen in recent media reporting, any cyber activity directed against the election infrastructure is likely to have an effect on public confidence — even if the cyber operation is unsuccessful or not intended to impact the election," such as a threat from a voter registration database.

A Sept. 2, 2016, email from the FBI said a sentence in a document regarding Russia’s intent should be "softened." The email said the unedited sentence "would indicate that we have definitive information that Russia does intend to disrupt our elections and we are uncomfortable making that assessment at this point." 

The email suggested changing the wording so that it didn’t "mislead the reader to believe that the (intelligence community) currently has information indicating Russia has a known intent to influence the elections."

Gabbard highlights some of those sections in her summary memo.

But there were more damning intelligence official statements about the potential for election interference.

For example, the Sept. 2 FBI email said, "In an extremely close race, it is certainly possible that a very targeted cyber attack aimed at manipulating votes could lead to a change to the legitimate results and affect the outcome of the election," such as in a swing county in a swing state.

"Although this is unlikely, it certainly remains a possibility and one that can’t be discounted — due to the high impact — even with the disjointed nature of US election technology," the FBI wrote.

A Sept. 14 report to Obama said foreign adversaries, most notably Russia, "can conduct cyber operations against election infrastructure to undermine the credibility of the process and weaken the perceived legitimacy of the winning candidate."

Documents show some disagreement about the confidence in some conclusions. For example, the FBI and CIA had high confidence that Russia sought to discredit the U.S. election process and harm Clinton’s reputation in support of Trump. The NSA expressed moderate confidence in these conclusions.

RELATED: Trump falsely twists Obama-era assessment of Russian election interference as a ‘coup’

The assessment that Obama requested "completely contradicted those assessments that had come previously." Fox News, July 22 

That’s inaccurate. The post-election assessment did not completely contradict earlier assessments. 

On Dec. 8, 2016, intelligence community officials discussed the President’s Daily Brief, saying Russians did not influence election results via cyberattacks. Officials planned to issue the classified brief to Obama the next day but did not. 

Around the same time, Obama asked for a comprehensive analysis about Russian meddling back to 2008, including how Moscow sought to influence the 2016 election and what it hoped to achieve, and an assessment of possible future risks. 

That assessment, produced in early January 2017, said Russia "probably was in a position to tamper with some voter registration databases" but "the types of systems we observed Russian actors targeting or compromising are not involved in vote tallying." 

It also said Moscow’s influence campaign blended covert operations such as cyber activity with overt efforts by government agencies, state media and social media trolls. 

"Moscow would have seen its election influence campaign as at least a qualified success regardless of the outcome of the election because of its perceived ability to impact public discussion in the United States," it said. 

Intelligence officials during the Obama administration "all knew that the Steele dossier was discredited at this point." Fox News, July 18, 2025

The dossier was compiled during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele and contained numerous explosive but unverified claims about the Trump campaign and Russia.

Intelligence officials used the dossier, to some extent, to persuade a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court to authorize surveillance of Trump campaign adviser Carter Page. But it was the actions of another Trump campaign adviser — George Papadopoulos — that actually started special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into whether the Trump campaign committed wrongdoing.

The two-year Mueller report presented a sweeping narrative of Russia’s 2016 election interference and reaffirmed the intelligence community’s conclusion that Russia favored Trump over Clinton. However, Mueller found the Kremlin’s acts on Trump’s behalf and numerous contacts between the campaign and Russia didn't rise to the level of criminal conspiracy or coordination.

Chief Correspondent Louis Jacobson contributed to this article.