Explaining Russiagate: Why the December 9th, 2016 Meeting Mattered

It's not just what the Intelligence Community planned to say about Russian interference, it's who would have seen the text

Barack Obama’s decision to order a new Intelligence Community Assessment turbo-charged conspiracy theories about Trump and Russia

Partisan wrangling over Russiagate continued over the weekend, with Democrats continuing harsh critiques of Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and her release of documents about Russian interference from Barack Obama’s last presidential days. Connecticut congressman Jim Himes went on Face the Nation to say “when you start throwing around language like sedition and treason, somebody is going to get hurt,” adding, “The mouth-breathers on MAGA online are just going out of their minds based on a lie.”

Donald Trump responded last night with a Truth Social post that cast Russiagate as a V for Vendetta trailer, promising an upcoming political blockbuster. This president is a lot of things, but boring isn’t one of them.

In between all this, an important detail is being lost. Democrats are hammering an “apples and oranges” argument, saying documents showing intelligence officials planned a Presidential Daily Briefing on December 9th, 2016 that would say “Foreign adversaries did not use cyberattacks on election infrastructure to alter the US Presidential election outcome” and “We have no evidence of cyber manipulation of election infrastructure intended to alter results” were meaningless.

As Himes put it, the fact that “Russians could not use cyber tools to mess with the voting infrastructure, the machines that tally our votes” was “true then, and it is true now.” Two things about this statement, disingenuous in multiple ways: