‘Has she ever met a Russian agent?’: Ex-CIA counterintelligence chief blasts Tulsi Gabbard’s ‘treasonous conspiracy’ claims

A former top counterintelligence leader at the CIA has firmly rejected recent accusations made by Tulsi Gabbard, the current director of national intelligence.

This was all about what Gabbard calls a “treasonous conspiracy” carried out by the Obama administration against Donald Trump. The former CIA official, who played a key role in overseeing intelligence reports in the 2016 presidential election, says Gabbard’s claims are based on false information and a basic misunderstanding of how intelligence work is done.

Gabbard has openly accused Barack Obama and his former national security team of intentionally creating false intelligence to make it seem like Russian President Vladimir Putin interfered in the 2016 election to help Trump, even though she claims they knew this wasn’t true. Gabbard argues that the real goal of these actions was to undermine Trump’s election win, starting what she calls a “years-long coup” against him.

Gabbard has taken the issue further by sending it to the attorney general, who then announced a Justice Department “strike force” to look into the claims. Gabbard has also demanded criminal charges against several officials, including Obama. However, The Guardian spoke with a former CIA official named Susan Miller spent 39 years at the agency and served as a CIA station chief overseas, and strongly disagrees with Gabbard’s version of events.

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Miller pointed out that Gabbard had no experience working with intelligence committees while she was in Congress and criticized Gabbard’s remarks about the methods used by intelligence agents who put together the report on Russia’s election interference. She said, “My reputation and my team’s reputation is on the line. Tulsi comes out and doesn’t use my name, doesn’t use the names of the people in my team, but basically says this was all wrong and made up, et cetera.”

Miller asked, “Has she ever met a Russian agent? Has she ever given diamonds to a Russian who’s giving us, you know? Has she ever walked on the streets of Moscow to do a dead drop? Has she ever handled an agent? No. She’s never done any of that. She clearly doesn’t understand this.”

The former official directly denies Gabbard’s main claims, especially the idea that the findings about Russian interference were a “hoax.” She says the assessment was based on solid, real intelligence from trusted sources and other verified information.

She also dismissed Gabbard’s argument that Obama’s statement contradicted the intelligence community’s conclusions that no voting machines were tampered with. The former official clarified that the CIA’s report on Russian interference never claimed that election machines were hacked. Instead, it focused on hidden operations like fake news articles, online content, and incidents like the hacking of Democratic National Committee emails.

She explained that while the intelligence clearly showed Russia’s attempts to help Trump win, it was impossible to measure exactly how much this influenced individual voters. So really, they just can’t prove they’re right, but they can easily prove they’re not wrong.