By LifeZette News Staff
Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard released a set of documents Wednesday that she described as newly declassified and significant to the origins of the Russia investigation tied to the 2016 presidential election.
Gabbard shared details of the materials with White House reporters during the daily briefing Wednesday afternoon, outlining what she said were findings related to actions taken by senior Obama administration officials and intelligence leadership before President Donald Trump took office.
According to Gabbard, the documents include a House Intelligence Committee report that had been stored in a Central Intelligence Agency vault for nearly a decade.
She said the materials show that senior officials during the Obama administration, including leadership at the FBI and CIA, advanced intelligence assessments that portrayed then-candidate Donald Trump as benefiting from Russian interference, despite what she characterized as a lack of reliable supporting evidence.
Gabbard said the report focuses on intelligence assessments produced in the final weeks of the Obama administration and alleges that information was altered or selectively presented to support conclusions that Russia interfered in the 2016 election to help Trump win.
She said the documents show that the underlying claims were known by officials at the time to be unsupported.
During a television segment summarizing the findings, Jesse Watters outlined four core claims that formed the basis of the Russia collusion narrative: