OAN Staff Brooke Mallory
6:02 PM – Monday, August 4, 2025
Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard says that Russian officials privately anticipated Hillary Clinton’s triumph in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, characterizing her victory as inevitable. She expounded upon a recently released report during her appearance on Miranda Devine’s “Pod Force One” podcast.
Contrary to prevailing mainstream media narratives suggesting that Russia had favored Donald Trump, Gabbard maintained that Moscow’s true aim was to destabilize the U.S. political landscape while simultaneously preparing for an anticipated Clinton administration.
She based this claim on a collection of intelligence documents recently released by her team.
“It surprised me that all of these documents still existed, quite frankly,” Gabbard remarked in an episode scheduled for release on Wednesday. “As we’ve learned in later documents that we’ve reviewed throughout that campaign, Russia believed that Hillary Clinton would win the election.
“They felt it was inevitable.”
Last month, Gabbard’s team began unveiling a trove of documents offering a rare glimpse into the internal operations of the intelligence community during the 2016 election, particularly concerning the investigation into alleged Russian interference.
Among the documents was a 2020 report from the House Intelligence Committee, which found that Russian intelligence may have obtained information suggesting Clinton had been “placed on a daily regimen of ‘heavy tranquilizers’… while afraid of losing.”
This was allegedly due to her “psycho-emotional problems, including uncontrolled fits of anger, aggression, and cheerfulness,” the report added.
During the recent interview, Gabbard questioned why, if Russia’s principal objective had been to bolster Donald Trump’s candidacy and discredit Clinton, such incendiary intelligence was never made public.
“If Russia aspired to help Trump get elected, which is what the manufactured January 2017 intelligence community assessment says with high confidence, according to Brennan and Clapper, then Putin would have released the most damaging information and emails to help President Trump,” she said.
“It was intentionally withheld and not released because they assumed that Hillary Clinton would win that election, and their plan,” Gabbard added, citing the 2020 report, “[was to] wait until maybe days or weeks before her inauguration to release these documents.”
Democrat officials had widely alleged that Russian operatives were responsible for hacking Democratic National Committee emails during the 2016 campaign.
However, the 2020 House Intelligence Committee report concluded that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s specific “principal motivations in these operations were to undermine faith in the U.S. democratic process.”
“The American people, I think, have been, and our republic, has been most harmed by this,” Gabbard said regarding the narrative. “Of course, President Trump went through hell and his family because of this Russia hoax that was manufactured by President Obama and his administration.”
Meanwhile, former CIA Director John Brennan and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper have accused Gabbard of disseminating “patently false” allegations regarding their involvement in the “Russian hoax” investigation. Brennan and Clapper cited a 2020 bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee report which claimed that the panel “heard consistently that analysts were under no politically motivated pressure to reach specific conclusions.” The two men also recently authored an op-ed claiming that the intelligence community’s assessment never alleged any “collusion” between Trump and the Russian government, suggesting that the idea was merely media fodder.
However, they still reaffirmed their opinion that the Kremlin preferred Trump to win in the 2016 election — despite Gabbard’s findings.
Key Points:
- Declassified, newly released intelligence documents, including a 2020 House Intelligence Committee report, shows a lack of intent from Moscow to back Trump, according to Gabbard, and instead focuses on preparing for a likely Clinton presidency and biding their time before releasing “damaging material” (the alleged intel on Clinton’s “psycho‑emotional problems”) closer to her inauguration.
- Her team argues the 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) was politically motivated, ignoring or suppressing credible intelligence suggesting alternate motives by Moscow.
- Putin also seemed to expect Clinton to win, and held back on “some compromising material for post-election use against the expected Clinton administration.”
- The Senate report stated that lawmakers were given “specific intelligence reporting to support the assessment that Putin and the Russian Government demonstrated a preference for candidate Trump.”
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