Tulsi Gabbard on Russiagate Hoax Evidence and How She's Reforming Politicized Intelligence Agencies

**David Sacks** (0:01)
From Democratic Congresswoman to staunch Trump supporter.

**Jason Calacanis** (0:04)
Both loved and heavily criticized for her independent thinking.

**Tulsi Gabbard** (0:08)
She won't be bought, she won't be bullied.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (0:10)
The Director of National Intelligence.

**Friedberg** (0:11)
Tulsi Gabbard.

**David Sacks** (0:14)
Aloha.

**Tulsi Gabbard** (0:15)
It's just BS. I've always been a very fiercely independent minded person. I know exactly what I need to do here and how deep the rot is within the intelligence community that has to be rooted out.

**Friedberg** (0:31)
Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Tulsi Gabbard. Nice to see you, Tulsi. Thanks for coming.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (0:53)
Thank you for being here.

**Tulsi Gabbard** (0:54)
Thank you. Aloha, everybody.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (0:57)
Aloha. We were all clamoring to kind of frame this, and then Sacks said, I really just need to do the kickoff because he really wanted to tee this up. So I'm gonna cede my responsibility in introducing you because everybody knows who you are. But David, there's just too much red meat. David's been frothing.

**David Sacks** (1:21)
Tulsi doesn't need a big introduction. Everyone knows she's a Director of National Intelligence. And in the words of President Trump, is the hottest member of the administration. I think he means in the sense of having released the biggest news story of the year. And specifically, files, you declassified and released a series of files related to the whole Russiagate hoax and many of the documents are just stunning. I'll let you speak to it. But I think, you know, there's still maybe a few holdouts out there in the world, not that many who still don't really understand.

**Tulsi Gabbard** (1:52)
Who are you looking at right now?

**David Sacks** (1:53)
Who are you talking about? No one in particular, but who don't seem to understand what this Russiagate hoax was about. Can you just, maybe this is the place to start and then we can drill into some of the details, but just at a very high level, what exactly happened? I mean, I think we saw for years, there were all these accusations that somehow that Trump was an agent of Putin, of Russia. Was that all just made up and who made it up? How did that happen?

**Tulsi Gabbard** (2:18)
Yeah, I think just setting the baseline of like, why should you care? Why should people at home care about this? And this really speaks to the power of the intelligence community and the power of quote-unquote intelligence, is that as these headlines were turning out about Trump is a Putin puppet or he is colluding with Putin in order to get elected, we're going back to the 2016 election here. If you're just watching the headlines from home, you got to believe that there's some credibility here, that there's some intelligence that's actually driving this. And that really is the significance of the documents that we uncovered, declassified, and released, that shows how intelligence and information can be actually manipulated intentionally, so that it shows something that is not reflective of the truth at all, and how it can be done in a deeply impactful way, politicizing it in what we essentially saw throughout President Trump's candidacy in 2016, and throughout his four years in office.
The documents we uncovered really served as the foundation for the weapon that was used to undermine his presidency, to try to undermine the outcome of that 2016 election, and really usurp the will and the voices of the people who elected Donald Trump. So, I'll try to run through this timeline in the top lines just to paint the picture of, as you asked David, like where and how did this start? When we go back to that 2016 campaign, President Trump went through what was a very crowded primary at the time. Almost no one thought that he could win. He became the Republican nominee, going up against Hillary Clinton, and during that time Hillary Clinton kind of seeded the allegation that there was some collusion happening between Trump and Putin and Russia, that Putin was somehow trying to get Trump elected. But what we saw then play out was now known as-

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (4:23)
So what does it mean she seeded?

**Tulsi Gabbard** (4:26)
There were a lot of different ways that that occurred. If you go and look at some of the documents that the FBI declassified, that Durham Uncovered is now known as the Durham Annex, there were a lot of different ways that it happened. But we saw early signs of the weaponization of this when the FBI under Comey basically got illegal, they got warrants through the FISA Court to illegally surveil Americans, Carter Page in Crossfire Hurricane and others around President Trump and his campaign at that time. November 2016, President Trump shocks the world and wins the election. The intelligence community and the assessments in all these documents we've made public already throughout this period of time during the campaign, leading up to the general election, the intelligence community almost uniformly assessed that Putin did not have either the intent or the capability to hack the outcome of the US election. There were different assessments that said this, but this trend was there. President Trump wins the election, members of the intelligence community then go and brief members of Congress post-election, and their briefing was consistent with the intelligence reports that basically said there's no evidence that nothing to see. There's that Russia or Putin had any kind of impact on the outcome of the US election. Fast forward to December 8th. One of the organization, one of the elements that's under my oversight in the intelligence community creates this product for the president every day called the president's daily brief. The numbers of people who within the cabinet even who are able to access this brief is a pretty small number. This is built for the president and it is a product of contributions from across the intelligence community. This December 8th president's daily brief was consistent with all of the other assessments, essentially saying there was no interference in the outcome of the election by Russia. That brief was pulled, it was never published. It was pulled back from publishing hours before it would have hit then President Obama's desk. The next day, December 9th, the Obama administration calls a National Security Council meeting, all the senior leaders within the Obama administration. The topic of discussion was Russia. The tasks that came from that meeting that were delivered to then Obama's DNI James Clapper, and we have the e-mails that we declassified around this, said this is a POTUS tasking on Russia meddling with the election. What you'll see in those documents was not President Obama asking, look into the intelligence and see if Russia meddled the election. It was provide me with an assessment saying how Russia meddled in the election.