Eli Lake: Gabbard is Wrong about a "Treasonous Conspiracy"

This seems exactly right to me, and it's backed up by Andy McCarthy, who's been all over the Russiagate hoax:

Andrew McCarthy, the author of an early debunking of Russiagate, Ball of Collusion, and a former assistant U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, told me on Sunday, “There is nothing new in email communications DNI Tulsi Gabbard is hyping as a bombshell. We have known for years that Obama-era national security officials promoted a bogus Trump-Russia collusion narrative fabricated by the Clinton campaign. Gabbard now claims inconsistency between what intelligence officials were saying around the time of the 2016 election and thereafter, but there is no contradiction.”
One area where Gabbard does bring new information to light is the revelation of a whistleblower inside the intelligence community who did not believe that the intelligence supported the conclusion in the January 6, 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment that “the Russian government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump.” The release from Friday includes this tantalizing quote from the whistleblower: “As for the 2017 ICA’s judgment of a decisive Russian preference for then-candidate Donald Trump, I could not concur in good conscience based on information available, and my professional analytic judgment.”
This is not the first time this issue has been raised. The 2018 report from Republicans on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence also found that the intelligence did not support the assertion that the Kremlin favored Trump in the 2016 election; rather, its goal was to stoke chaos inside the U.S. political system.
All of these are important points for the historical record. But they hardly amount to the “treasonous conspiracy” that Gabbard is accusing Trump’s political opposition of fomenting.

So this seems to be just a mirror-image of Russiagate itself: exaggerating the available evidence to torpedo political opponents by libelously accusing them of treason.

   However, we don't really know what Obama's role was in promoting the Russiagate conspiracy theory, I have little doubt that Trump is playing a significant role in this one.

   Now, Trump has been right about a lot of such stuff--and he was impeached for being (apparently) right about Biden-family influence-peddling in Ukraine. He was notoriously wrong about Obama's birth certificate--though he did eventually admit that.

   But, anyway, this seems to me to be Trump's (righteous) anger at the Democrat sleaze machine getting out of control. I'm happy for Gabbard to declassify the relevant documents. But wild claims of treason against a former President, unsupported by the evidence is just the sort of bullshit that even those of us unplagued by TDS have been dreading.