Tulsi Gabbard threatens to shred Marco Rubio with scramble to help Trump

President Donald Trump's intelligence chief Tulsi Gabbard could wind up roping in Secretary of State Marco Rubio in her half-baked effort to expose a "treasonous conspiracy" against the president, according to a fact-checker.

The director of national intelligence released alleged evidence Friday accusing Barack Obama and his high-ranking administration officials of a criminal conspiracy against Trump related to the Russiagate investigation, and Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler examined her claims – which she says will be referred for prosecution – against previous probes of the matter.

"All told, the previous [investigative] reports add up to about 2,500 pages of dense prose, compared with the thin gruel of emails and meeting agendas released by Gabbard," Kessler wrote. "Her report provides no indication that she has studied the earlier investigations. Yet she asserts there was 'direct intent to cover up the truth about what occurred.'"

"If so, one of the co-conspirators would be current Secretary of State Marco Rubio," he added.

Rubio, then a Republican senator from Florida serving on the Intelligence Committee, signed off on reports that looked into the creation of the Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) about Russia's meddling in the 2016 election, and one volume of those findings spent nearly 160 pages on the assessment Gabbard dredged up as questionable.

“The Committee found the ICA presents a coherent and well-constructed intelligence basis for the case of unprecedented Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election,” the Senate report said. “On the analytic lines of the ICA, the Committee concludes that all [redacted] analytic lines are supported with all-source intelligence, although with varying substantiation. The Committee did not discover any significant analytic tradecraft issues in the preparation or final presentation of the ICA.”

Rubio also accepted another volume of the report that concluded Vladimir Putin had personally ordered a hack of Democratic operatives.

“Moscow’s intent was to harm the Clinton Campaign, tarnish an expected Clinton presidential administration, help the Trump Campaign after Trump became the presumptive Republican nominee, and undermine the U.S. democratic process,” the report stated.

The Senate investigation concluded that Trump was personally complicit, but their findings match up with allegations by special counsel Robert Mueller, who determined that Russian operatives successfully hacked Hillary Clinton's campaign and Democratic Party organizations, and those materials were posted online by WikiLeaks and other intermediaries to help the Republican candidate win the election.

"Why did the intelligence community become more convinced that Putin directed the effort to swing the election to Trump, instead of just seeking to inject turmoil in the U.S. elections?" Kessler wrote. "As the news reports misquoted by Gabbard show — and as subsequent investigations confirmed — additional, credible intelligence showed that Putin decided to back Trump over Clinton. That’s not a conspiracy but a natural evolution from careful investigative work."