Tulsi Gabbard's 'treason' claim smacked down by CNN fact-checker

CNN fact-checker Daniel Dale tore into Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, after she gave a press briefing in which she doubled down on her claim former President Barack Obama committed "treason" and improperly manipulated intelligence agencies during the Russia investigation.

The claim is based on documents the Trump administration surfaced earlier this month — but those documents don't actually support what Gabbard or Trump are saying, Dale explained.

"Can you help us by fact-checking some of the things that the DNI, Tulsi Gabbard, said just then?" asked anchor Jim Sciutto.

"Yeah," said Dale, a frequent debunker of Trump's false claims. "So obviously I haven't seen all the materials that she and that position has seen, but she has been attacking this intelligence assessment from early 2017, put out by the intelligence community and suggesting that it contradicted previous findings that the intelligence community had previously concluded that Russia could not alter vote counts and so on."

However, he continued, the 2017 assessment Gabbard is attacking and claiming Obama manipulated "did not find that there was any alteration of vote counts, that Russia had changed the outcome. Rather, it found that Russia had made this kind of effort through hacking Democratic organizations, through social media influence dissemination, organization. And I think it's very important to note that the Republican-controlled Senate Intelligence Committee reviewed these findings about Russia's actions and found that not only were they well-supported, but also that there had not been political interference by the Obama administration with the intelligence community in developing these conclusions."

"So this suggestion that there is some treasonous activity by former President Obama, basically, in simply asking the intelligence community or directing the intelligence community to come up with an assessment of Russia's well-documented activities is simply not borne out by the evidence that DNI Gabbard and President Trump have presented so far in the last week," Dale concluded.

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