A former CIA officer blasted Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard on Wednesday over claims she's made regarding former President Barack Obama and his intelligence agencies.
Susan Miller, who helped investigate Russia's meddling in the 2016 election, told The Guardian that Gabbard "clearly doesn’t understand" intelligence work. The Guardian's Robert Tait characterized it as Gabbard being "ignorant" of espionage work.
Miller also pushed back against Gabbard's claims that intelligence officials "manufactured" the Russia investigation to hurt President Donald Trump politically. Gabbard added that the efforts amounted to a "treasonous conspiracy" against the president
Gabbard has also called for Obama to face criminal prosecution for any role he played in the investigation.
“It is not a hoax,” Miller told the outlet. “This was based on real intelligence. It’s reporting we were getting from verified agents and from other verified streams of intelligence.
“It was so clear [the Russians] were doing that, that it was never in issue back in 2016. It’s only an issue now because Tulsi wants it to be," she continued.
Some experts have suggested that Gabbard is making these statements to curry favor with Trump. She has recently been out of the spotlight after Trump publicly dismissed the intelligence community's assessments on Iran and the 2020 election.
Miller also dismissed Gabbard's claims that Obama pressured intelligence agents to come to specific conclusions in the Russia investigation, and her claims about Russia's technical ability to meddle in elections.
“They were trying to do it through covert action of press pieces, internet pieces, things like that. The DNC [Democratic National Committee] hack [when Russian hackers also penetrated the emails of Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta, and passed them to WikiLeaks] … is [also] part of it," Miller told The Guardian
“That’s why we came out with the conclusion that 100% the Russians tried to influence the election on Trump’s part, [but] 100%, unless we polled every voter, we can’t tell if it worked. If we’d known anything about election machines, it would have been a very different thing," she continued.