National Security & Defense

Gabbard appears to recognize, however, what she has to do to stay in the White House’s good graces. The conservative Washington Times reported:

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard fired a broadside at congressional Democrats on Monday by saying their 2019 impeachment of President Trump over his dealings with Ukraine was based on biased evidence and slipshod work from within the intelligence community.

The CIA whistleblower whose complaint became the basis of the impeachment was an anti-Trump registered Democrat who misled investigators about collaborating with Democrats, Ms. Gabbard said.

In a statement, the DNI argued that “deep-state actors within the Intelligence Community” secretly conspired to “usurp the will of the American people and impeach the duly-elected president of the United States,” whom she characterized as a poor and unsuspecting victim.....

In November 2019, as congressional Democrats finalized their case in Trump’s impeachment, The Associated Press published a rather brutal analysis that highlighted the “mountain of evidence” that was uncontested and “beyond dispute.” From the AP’s article:

Trump explicitly ordered U.S. government officials to work with his personal attorney Rudy Giuliani on matters related to Ukraine, a country deeply dependent on Washington’s help to fend off Russian aggression. The Republican president pushed Ukraine to launch investigations into political rivals, leaning on a discredited conspiracy theory his own advisers disputed. And both American and Ukrainian officials feared that Trump froze a much-needed package of military aid until Kyiv announced it was launching those probes.

Those facts were confirmed by a dozen witnesses, mostly staid career government officials who served both Democratic and Republican administrations. They relied on emails, text messages and contemporaneous notes to back up their recollections from the past year.

Around the same time, Eugene Robinson added in a Washington Post column, “After this week’s impeachment testimony, if Republicans continue to insist that Dear Leader President Trump did absolutely nothing wrong — and they might do just that — then the GOP has surrendered any claim to being a political party. It would be a full-fledged cult of personality.”.....

Gabbard is apparently eager to play her part, helping Trump rewrite the story and concoct a satisfying counternarrative. The president will no doubt make a fresh push to get GOP lawmakers to wipe the slate clean.

But for those who care about accountability and the truth, the DNI’s efforts should be recognized as misguided nonsense.