Are Tulsi Gabbard’s Russiagate revelations a bombshell or a nothingburger? That’s a question being debated by Free Press staffers and readers. Last week, Eli Lake explained why, in his view, the new documents don’t change much. Today, Josh Hammer argues that the release really is a big deal. Scroll down to read his take—and then read our legal columnist Jed Rubenfeld’s view.
Still not sure where you stand? Or just want to watch two people who know what they’re talking about argue about this? Watch Eli Lake and Josh Hammer in a Free Press livestream Tuesday at 10 a.m. ET.
It may surprise some younger readers to learn that the legacy media and establishment political class were once in unanimous agreement that Donald Trump, the toughest-talking and toughest-acting president of Gen Z’s lifetime, was a Russian asset. Most opinion-shapers of the American ruling class actually thought that. And they said it, too—frequently.
According to this once-dominant view, Trump was helped across the finish line during the 2016 election by Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin, who supported him as a kind of Manchurian candidate. The idea was that Russia possessed ample kompromat—compromising material suitable for blackmail—against Trump, up to and including a “pee tape” of Trump-retained prostitutes performing “golden shower” urination shows in front of him.
In hindsight—and to many of us at the time—this all seems absolutely preposterous. Not least because Trump’s actions in office have hardly advanced Moscow’s agenda.
This is the same Donald Trump who, during his first year as president, delivered a sterling speech defending Western civilization and lambasting the horrors of twentieth-century totalitarianism in a location no less symbolic than Warsaw—and who signed a major arms and missile defense deal with Poland shortly thereafter. It is the same Donald Trump who, during his first term, approved military aid to Ukraine that his predecessor had blocked. And this is the same Donald Trump who recently called Putin “absolutely crazy,” and has allegedly even asked Volodymyr Zelensky whether Kyiv could strike Moscow if the United States provided long-range weapons.
If anyone is still wondering why populism and disdain for elites is so ascendant across the political spectrum in 2025, the answer begins with Russiagate.
No matter. For much of the 2016 presidential cycle as well as the Robert Mueller probe–hijacked first two years of the first Trump presidency, the “Trump as Russian asset” narrative dominated America’s media and political landscape. Thanks to Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, we now have a better sense as to why: This brazenly false and dangerous narrative was concocted in the very highest echelons of both the Democratic Party and the federal government itself.
