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A big thank you to Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard for once again providing us with an opportunity to explain why Donald Trump’s lamentations about a supposed “Russia hoax” are complete BS. 

To Donald Trump, anything that makes him look bad in any way is a “hoax,” no matter how much evidence there is to the contrary. 

There is the “Russia Hoax,” which we will examine in greater detail in this column; the newly added “Epstein Hoax”; and the “Too Much Bronzer Hoax,” which we made up — but you get the idea where we are going with this. 

The point is that, whenever Trump calls something a “hoax,” then it is definitely not a hoax. Of course, that doesn’t usually stop his supporters from loudly proclaiming otherwise. 

For example, in the case of the “Russia Hoax,” they’ll disregard the bipartisan finding that Vladimir Putin unquestionably tried to damage Hillary Clinton’s campaign in the 2016 election on the basis that nobody ever proved there was “collusion” between Moscow and Team Trump.

But that’s not the point. 

Russia didn’t need to work with the Trump campaign to hack Democratic email accounts and then launder that information through Wikileaks to ensure that Clinton received negative press for weeks. By the way, that wasn’t for a lack of trying on the Trump campaign’s part. 

For example, when Donald Trump Jr. was approached by a Russian with “very high level and sensitive information” that supposedly incriminated Clinton and was “part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr Trump,” he responded with “I love it” and set up a meeting.

That’s just one example of the many verified contacts between the campaign and Russians. Ultimately, however, nobody ever established clear evidence that these contacts rose to the level of “collusion.” 

Here is what the report from special counsel Robert Mueller had to say about it. 

Although the investigation established that the Russian government perceived it would benefit from a Trump presidency and worked to secure that outcome, and that the [Trump] Campaign expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts, the investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.

In other words, it’s pretty clear that both sides wanted to work together. However, Moscow didn’t really need the cooperation of the Trump campaign in order to carry out its well-documented influence campaign on behalf of the Republican candidate. 

And by “well-documented,” we mean very well-documented.

In addition to the Mueller report, there is also a bipartisan 960-page Senate Intelligence Committee report that states that “the Russian government engaged in an aggressive, multi-faceted effort to influence, or attempt to influence, the outcome of the 2016 election.”

When it was released, the acting chairman of the committee noted that there was “irrefutable evidence of Russian meddling.” 

That senator was current Secretary of State Marco Rubio.   

In other words, it… was… not… a…. hoax!

But this is what Trump and his supporters do. They move the goalposts (not just out of the stadium but out of the state in which the stadium is located) or seize on some tiny aspect of an issue and then pretend that this tiny aspect is the entire thing. 

For example, when it comes to the “Epstein Hoax,” their response might be something like, “There is no evidence that Donald Trump snuck into Jeffrey Epstein’s jail cell in 2019 and strangled him with his bare hands.” 

True, but nobody is claiming that to be the case.. 

There are obviously many well-documented links between the two, including Trump making references to Epstein’s preference for young women with seeming approval and a series of bizarre statements the president made about Epstein, his associate Ghislaine Maxwell, and the case.

Finally, the underlying crimes that Epstein committed are very real — there were hundreds of victims — and so are the many known links between Epstein and Trump, so where is the hoax? 

But back to Russia. 

On Friday, the Trump administration was at it again — possibly to distract from the Epstein mess the president has created.

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard presented what sounds like a bombshell: 

The information we are releasing today clearly shows there was a treasonous conspiracy in 2016 committed by officials at the highest level of our government. Their goal was to subvert the will of the American people and enact what was essentially a years-long coup with the objective of trying to usurp the President from fulfilling the mandate bestowed upon him by the American people.

WOW!!!

Sounds serious. But is it? Of course not.

First of all, keep in mind that Trump and his underlings like to use words that describe the president’s own crimes, like “coup” or “insurrection” to make it seem as though this is something that occurs all the time, especially at the hands of Democrats. 

We saw that in recent weeks, when White House ghoul Stephen Miller referred to protests in LA as an “insurrection,” and in this case, when Gabbard uses the word “coup.” This is an intentional manipulation of language to make Trump’s own coup attempt and the violent January 6 insurrection sound less bad. 

So, what was this sensational revelation? 

Did the Russians not do all of the things that they had demonstrably done to help Trump? Did the president’s son not eagerly take a meeting with Russians to get damaging information on his dad’s opponent? 

There is no doubt that all those things occurred. 

What Gabbard revealed in an 11-page report is that the intelligence committee did not think that the Russians had hacked voting machines to change the outcome of the election. 

Here is the thing: Nobody is claiming that this is what happened or that such hacking is the reason Trump won.

For example, here is what then-President Barack Obama, who is supposedly in on this “coup,” said in December of 2016:

I can assure the public that there was not the kind of tampering with the voting process that was of concern, and will continue to be of concern going forward, that the votes that were cast were counted, they were counted appropriately, we have not seen evidence of machines being tampered with.

That is the opposite of what Gabbard alleges.

Of course, that didn’t stop MAGA-friendly influencers and reporters from blowing the announcement out of proportion. 

“PROOF! The Russia Collusion Hoax was just that… a HOAX,” proclaimed White House director of communications Steven Cheung. “The Obama administration ‘manufactured and politicized intelligence’ to create the narrative that Russia was attempting to influence the 2016 presidential election.”

While Gabbard retweeted that take (and many similar ones from right-wing mouthpieces and conspiracy theorists who called for Obama to be tried for treason), that’s obviously not what she is actually alleging in her little document, which is solely about the cyber hacking of the election infrastructure. 

And, once again, that’s not something anyone was alleging.

In other words, the bombshell is a dud because it tries to conflate two completely different things. 

There is absolutely no doubt that Russia interfered in the election on Trump’s behalf —  just not by hacking voting machines. 

Democrats weren’t amused by Gabbard’s sleight of hand. 

“It seems DNI Gabbard is unaware that the years-long Russia investigation carried out by the Senate Intelligence Committee reaffirmed that ‘the Russian government directed extensive activity against US election infrastructure’ ahead of the 2016 election, and that it ‘used social media to conduct an information warfare campaign’ in order to benefit Donald Trump,” stated Sen. Mark Warner (VA), the ranking Democrat on the Intelligence Committee. “This conclusion was supported on a unanimous basis by every single Democrat and Republican on the committee.”

Warner added that “it is sadly not surprising that DNI Gabbard, who promised to depoliticize the intelligence community, is once again weaponizing her position to amplify the president’s election conspiracy theories.”

The senator is correct in saying that this is hardly a surprise. After all, this is a tried-and-tested strategy that keeps working for Trump and his associates, who are trying to pull the wool over the eyes of their supporters. 

Of course, in this case, they already believe the lie, which means that the real reason for releasing this information at this time probably was to distract the MAGA base from the Epstein case by giving them a new reason to go after Obama, who remains their top lightning rod.

And while they are unlikely to read this column, we are grateful that, once again, we can show that Russia absolutely interfered on Trump’s behalf, and that any reference to the “Russia Hoax” can be safely dismissed.