By Robert McGreevy. Media: Dailycaller
Legacy media’s biggest players — NBC News, The New York Times (NYT) and others — appear to be in full damage control mode over the “Russiagate” revelations Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Tulsi Gabbard unveiled Friday.
NBC accused Gabbard of trying to “rewrite the history of the 2016 election” in a Tuesday headline.
The lede of NBC’s story accuses Gabbard and President Donald Trump of “seeking to reverse an eight-year-old assessment that Russia waged an information war to boost Trump’s candidacy.”
The story touts conclusions made by the infamous 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) and by a 2020 Senate investigation which found that Russian President Vladimir Putin attempted to influence the 2016 U.S. election and damage Hilary Clinton’s candidacy
Those emails, Gabbard claimed in a Friday tweet, show that Obama’s own intelligence chiefs found that Russia “‘did not impact recent U.S. election results’ by conducting cyber attacks on infrastructure.”
However, despite accusing Gabbard of attempting to rewrite history, NBC does not cite the Obama administration intelligence agency emails she declassified until deep into the story. The outlet cites a talking point prepared for the Obama administration’s DNI, James Clapper, which was released by Gabbard Friday.
NBC also made no mention of a memo sent from a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) official to Obama’s DNI, James Clapper, which read, “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,” according to documents Gabbard declassified.
Similarly, The Washington Post’s fact checker Glenn Kessler claimed Gabbard’s accusations were “based on thin gruel.”
In his fact-check, Kessler raised doubts about claims that the infamous and now discredited Steele Dossier influenced the 2017 ICA.
“Calling it ‘a factor’ in the ICA is a stretch,” Kessler wrote.
Then-Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Director John Brennan was so insistent on including the Dossier in the ICA that he apparently defied warnings from numerous agency officials who asserted its inclusion could compromise the assessment’s integrity, according to a 2025 CIA review of the ICA, commissioned by CIA Director John Ratcliffe.
“Despite these objections, Brennan showed a preference for narrative consistency over analytical soundness,” the CIA memo stated.
National Public Radio (NPR) and the NYT also covered the Gabbard documents critically, both joining NBC and the Washington Post in burying a key detail from her revelations.
Gabbard’s documents show Obama cancelled a December 9, 2016, Presidential Daily Brief (PBD), which then-President-elect Donald Trump would have seen.
Trump’s former National Security Adviser, Michael Flynn, previously told journalist Matt Taibbi that Flynn “would have seen” the PBD if published.
Trump had previously received a PBD in November 2016, according to CNN.
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