Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard’s release of once-secret work documents has produced new clarity on what U.S. intel elites decided Russia did and didn’t do to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

She deserves our gratitude. Thanks to Gabbard’s decision to disclose a number of carefully redacted but readable work documents, Americans who were still confused can finally understand what really happened – and clearly didn’t happen – in that election in which both political parties seemed to end up communicating with us via towers of babble.

Most importantly, those of you who are still-doubting voters can read for yourselves the documents that will convince you about whether President Donald Trump’s director of national intelligence correctly claimed, just the other day, that former President Barack Obama and his team committed a “treasonous conspiracy” against Trump and the American people in the 2016 election.

2016? Why are we still talking about that? Well, so you won’t be talking about Trump and Jeffrey Epstein. So Gabbard came to the White House briefing room to tell you about it the other day. She and her boss and all who speak in the name of Team Trump are justifying it by carefully conflating two totally different types of potential election interference – hoping to get you all confused.

So we’ll spend a few minutes de-confusing everything. And today it’s easy to do – in just two short paragraphs about the types of election interference and influencing that Team Trump keeps mixing up:

One: Technical Cyber-interference of Elections – Evil-Doers can hack into computerized voting or vote-counting machines and potentially change votes for candidate X to become votes for candidate Y. But experts say those criminal acts would be easily detected.

Two: Election evil-doers can also illegally obtain and spread propaganda and negative news via social media, genuine news media or fake news media – all designed to harm one candidate and thus help the opponent. It can be done and has been done — big-time.

Here’s what we learned from reading those once-secret intelligence work and briefing documents that Gabbard released:

Concerning One: Intel experts concluded that the Russians and other nations Omay well be able to commit cyber-interference. But they found no evidence it happened. They concluded Russia apparently didn’t attempt to do it.

Concerning Two: Intel experts found numerous instances where Russians indeed attempted and succeeded in spreading all manner of negative or even absolutely fake news through social media and legitimate news organizations during the 2016 campaign that benefited Republican Trump or negatively impacted Democrat Hillary Clinton.

But Team Trump, including Gabbard, spent the past week repeatedly blending these two distinct election interference types together – and then quoting conclusions that type one cyber-interference didn’t happen as evidence that type two negative news and fake news also did not happen. Even though it clearly did.

Here, read for yourself some of the intel work documents Gabbard released to support her claim of treason against Obama. You can clearly see what the government’s intelligence experts were actually concluding:

“Sent: Friday, September 09, 2016 12:05 PM

“From: (the office of the Director of National Intelligence)

“To: (the offices of the DHS, FBI, CIA, NSA)

“… Russia probably is not trying to... influence the election by using cyber means to manipulate computer-enabled election infrastructure. Russia probably is using cyber means primarily to influence the election by stealing campaign party data and leaking select items, and it is also using public propaganda. This fits an historical pattern of Russia using less sophisticated propaganda and information operations to influence US elections.”

And:

“Sent: Friday, September 09, 2016 3:40 PM

“… while Russia has some capability to conduct cyber manipulation of election infrastructure, we judge that efforts by them (or others) to change the outcome of an election through cyber means would be detected….

“We assess that foreign adversaries, notably Russia, are more likely to focus their cyber operations on undermining credibility/public confidence. That assessment feeds directly into the influence operations, some cyber-enabled, that we've seen related to current and historic election cycles.”

So now that you’ve been included in the actual deliberations of the Obama intel team, you can see what was really happening – and what was not. You’d think we could all just move on, as adults, and deal with more urgent matters. But Trump clearly wants his Justice Department to probe Obama and others for treason – and Gabbard was eager to do her part. Why?

Well, Gabbard reportedly had been a Trump outsider within, excluded even from some of the Iran bombing decisions. But on Tuesday, as The New York Times’ Glenn Thrush and Julian E. Barnes reported, Trump was bubbling over as he told congressional Republicans about his DNI:

“She’s, like, hotter than everybody. She’s the hottest one in the room right now.”

And for a Washington Insider, that’s as cool as it gets.

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