New in SpyWeek: Gabbard, Ratcliffe, Trump Push Claim of Obama Conspiracy on Russian Election Interference Report

Also this week: Big cuts in State's INR, audacious North Korean spies, Iran nuke damage report, death of a legendary CIA mole hunter and more

Welcome to SpyWeek, our weekly intel news roundup, where we look at news from the intersection of intelligence, foreign policy, and military operations. Seth Hettena is off this week.

Gabbard’s Gambit: The director of National Intelligence left a room full of reporters stunned last week when she took to the White House press room podium to claim that Obama administration officials "manufactured" intelligence and its reporting on Russia’s efforts in the 2016 election to hurt Hillary Clinton and benefit Donald Trump. Not just that, Gabbard said she was making a criminal referral to the Justice Department on Obama and then-high ranking national security officials involved in the investigation. (Trump escalated the issue to “treason.”)

Criminalizing a debate over an official investigation is unprecedented, not to mention ominous. In an exclusive July 16 SpyTalk interview, Susan Miller, who captained the intelligence community’s 2016 election analysis, says there was “no coercion” from anyone in the Obama administration to tilt their findings in a way that besmearched Trump. In a Foreign Affairs piece headlined “Trump is breaking U.S. intelligence,” former CIA Director Michel Hayden and intelligence historian David Gioe compared Trump and Gabbard’s actions to Vladimir Putin’s demands for loyalty over truth telling.

But CIA Director John Ratcliffe praised Gabbard’s selectively curated declasification of documents, according to an agency spokesperson, calling it her “continued commitment to elevating the truth and bringing transparency to the American people…”

“But Gabbard has a problem,” commented Glenn Kessler, the two-time Pulitzer Prize winning journalist who has written The Washington Post’s authoritative  “Fact Checker” column since 2011.