For nearly a decade, Americans were told that Russia stole the 2016 election. The media said it. Intelligence officials signed off on it. And for four years, that narrative served as the foundation to delegitimize a sitting president. But with the release of the House Intelligence Committee’s newly declassified July 2025 report, the question isn’t whether Russia interfered. It’s who really interfered in our democracy—and why.
The report confirms that there was no verified intelligence showing Vladimir Putin preferred Donald Trump. The so-called “evidence” was manufactured inference, not fact. And yet it was used to trigger surveillance, public mistrust, and the most politically motivated investigation in modern history.
President Trump has now accused Barack Obama of “treason,” charging that the entire Russia probe was a calculated effort to derail his presidency before it began. Hillary Clinton, whose campaign helped fund the Steele dossier, has also been tied to what Trump calls “clear proof” of a coordinated effort to deceive the American public. Tulsi Gabbard, now serving as Director of National Intelligence, has echoed these concerns. In a recent White House briefing, she referred Obama to the Department of Justice for what she called “overwhelming evidence” of a fabricated intelligence narrative designed to delegitimize Trump.
Obama’s office has dismissed these claims as “ridiculous distractions.” But what’s not disputed—even by bipartisan bodies like the 2020 Senate Intelligence Committee—is that the Russia story was never about altering votes. It was about shaping perception. The influence campaign was real. But the collusion narrative? That came from inside our own government.
Gabbard’s declassified 44-page report provides more than just a rehashing of the past. It offers documentation that top intelligence officials—John Brennan, James Clapper, James Comey—helped shape an assessment that Russia favored Trump, despite no verified evidence supporting that conclusion. The narrative wasn’t born from intelligence—it was born from political inference dressed up as classified insight.
The report also reveals that Russia claimed to have compromising information on Hillary Clinton. U.S. intelligence picked up chatter suggesting Russian officials believed she was medically unfit to serve and allegedly reliant on tranquilizers. Whether true or not, this information wasn’t used in public discourse, weaponized by foreign actors, or inserted into official assessments.
Why not?
Because Hillary Clinton didn’t win.
If Russian intelligence had truly wanted to interfere, releasing that information could have been explosive. But when the final ballots were counted and she wasn’t the incoming president, the incentive to expose her vanished. In strategic terms, there’s no point in burning political ammunition on someone who holds no power. Her loss made the alleged kompromat irrelevant.
And that’s what makes the double standard so revealing.
While unverifiable claims about Trump were pushed to the public and cited in federal surveillance requests, potentially credible concerns about Clinton were buried. Intelligence wasn’t judged by its reliability—it was judged by its usefulness. They didn’t suppress Clinton’s vulnerabilities because they didn’t exist. They suppressed them because they no longer served the narrative.
The report also references a now-infamous email that former National Security Advisor Susan Rice sent to herself on Inauguration Day—documenting a White House meeting where President Obama instructed officials to handle the Russia investigation “by the book.” Critics view this not as routine recordkeeping but as a strategic memo to legally insulate the administration from what was, in effect, a politically driven operation. Rice was also among those who requested the unmasking of Trump transition officials, further underscoring how national security tools were deployed with political precision.
Meanwhile, the Department of Justice has received referrals for potential criminal wrongdoing by former Obama-era officials. Whether those referrals lead to prosecutions or are dismissed as political retaliation is secondary to the point: the machinery of government was used to interfere in an election, and the people responsible walked away with book deals and cable news contracts.
This wasn’t about protecting democracy. It was about controlling it.
The intelligence community was never supposed to operate as a partisan tool. But what the report reveals is a systemic abuse of power, justified under the guise of national security. If that power can be turned on a president, it can be turned on any citizen.
What matters now isn’t whether Trump was treated unfairly. What matters is whether we still live in a constitutional republic or an administrative state where intelligence officials make political decisions behind closed doors, and the public is expected to accept their conclusions without question.
The real threat to democracy was never just Russian trolls. It was the people in Washington who believed their power was above the will of the voters.
And now, we see many Democratic politicians shouting about oligarchy—about dark money, elite control, and the erosion of democracy. But when the dealings and deception come from within their own party, suddenly the outrage disappears. Let’s call a spade a spade. If we’re going to protect democracy, we need to call balls and strikes, no matter whose team is at bat.
