Fox News contributor Andy McCarthy torched Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard over her characterization of new emails she’s released to the public and the criminal referral she’s made to the Department of Justice.

In a press release headlined “New Evidence of Obama Administration Conspiracy to Subvert President Trump’s 2016 Victory and Presidency,” Gabbard’s office asserted that she had “revealed overwhelming evidence that demonstrates how, after President Trump won the 2016 election against Hillary Clinton, President [Barack] Obama and his national security cabinet members manufactured and politicized intelligence to lay the groundwork for what was essentially a years-long coup against President [Donald] Trump.”

Then on Monday, Fox reported that Gabbard had sent a “criminal referral” to the Department of Justice to pursue an investigation of Obama and prominent members of his administration.

In a column for National Review, McCarthy expressed his disapproval ofGabbard’s handling of the matter.

“Do Trump intelligence officials speak with each other? Does Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, read the reports generated by the Central Intelligence Agency? There is good reason to wonder,” mused McCarthy in his lede.

“No new light is shed on this episode by Gabbard’s email disclosures last Friday, which, unsurprisingly, were accompanied by an overwrought and misleading press release rather than an analytical report. Perhaps that is because Gabbard’s intelligence community peer, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, did issue an analytical report just a few days earlier that contradicts Gabbard’s implication that there was no evidence of Russian interference in the 2016 election,” he argued before continuing:

The public position of President Trump and his most ardent supporters — the position that Gabbard reiterates — is that Russiagate was a total hoax, a complete fabrication by Democrats, without a shred of truth to it, concocted to undermine his presidency. This has always been a foolish stance.

Russia habitually tries to influence American politics, including electoral politics, just as our government has for decades intruded in the politics of the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia. (In fact, the Obama administration’s support of the revolt that ousted Ukraine’s democratically elected, pro-Russian regime in 2013–14 motivated both Putin’s 2014 annexation of Crimea and the 2016 denigration of Clinton, Obama’s former secretary of state.) Russia’s efforts in this regard, and specifically in 2016, have been laughably ineffective; that doesn’t mean they haven’t happened at all.

The Democrats’ caterwauling that Russia stole the 2016 election from Clinton was nonsense. It has long been widely recognized for what it was: a fever dream by which Democrats sought to avoid conceding the true cause of the party’s loss — its nomination of a deeply unpopular, scandal-scarred, politically flat-footed candidate. Yet, by claiming that there was no evidence of Russian interference, the Trump camp invites correction (including, now, from the Trump administration’s own CIA) and thereby turns into a matter of consequence something that was utterly inconsequential.

Reflecting on Gabbard’s claims that “the facts reveal this new assessment [i.e., the ICA] was based on information that was known by those involved to be manufactured i.e. the Steele Dossier or deemed as not credible. This was politicized intelligence that was used as the basis for countless smears seeking to delegitimize President Trump’s victory, the years-long Mueller investigation, two Congressional impeachments, high-level officials being investigated, arrested, and thrown in jail, heightened US-Russia tensions, and more,” McCarthy observed:

Down here on Planet Earth, the use of the Steele dossier has been roundly condemned in government investigations (as it was in Ratcliffe’s new report). The Mueller probe, despite being staffed by anti-Trump partisans, concluded that there was no evidence of Trump-Russia collusion and did not delve into the dossier and the FISA debacle. No one who was prosecuted as a result of the Mueller investigation was charged with offenses related to the Steele dossier or the ICA. Trump’s two impeachments pertained to Ukraine and the Capitol riot — neither had anything to do with Russiagate or the 2016 ICA. And while it is characteristic of Gabbard to blame the United States for “heightened US-Russia tensions,” they have in fact been heightened because of Russia’s annexation of its neighbors’ territories and the monstrous war crimes it has committed in Ukraine.

McCarthy is the author of Ball of Collusion: The Plot to Rig an Election and Destroy a Presidency, a book about how the Clinton campaign and Obama administration colluded to help the former prevail against Trump.

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