Given her dreadful record, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard never should have been nominated in the first place. Given how poorly she fared during her confirmation process, Gabbard never should have been approved by Senate Republicans. The former congresswoman was confirmed 14 months ago nevertheless, and the results have been predictable.

In light of Gabbard’s many failures, controversies and embarrassments, few were surprised last week by reports that Donald Trump had considered firing the hapless DNI.

Gabbard appears to recognize, however, what she has to do to stay in the White House’s good graces. The conservative Washington Times reported:

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard fired a broadside at congressional Democrats on Monday by saying their 2019 impeachment of President Trump over his dealings with Ukraine was based on biased evidence and slipshod work from within the intelligence community.

The CIA whistleblower whose complaint became the basis of the impeachment was an anti-Trump registered Democrat who misled investigators about collaborating with Democrats, Ms. Gabbard said.

In a statement, the DNI argued that “deep-state actors within the Intelligence Community” secretly conspired to “usurp the will of the American people and impeach the duly-elected president of the United States,” whom she characterized as a poor and unsuspecting victim.

Her presentation (to the extent that one could credibly call it that) bordered on silly, which helps explain why it generated so little attention when Gabbard’s office released it.

But it pleased the DNI’s audience of one. On Tuesday morning, Trump used his social media platform to publish two items, both of which were built around the idea that Gabbard’s latest foolishness should help the president’s crusade to “expunge” his first impeachment — a priority he’s pushed intermittently for years.

I can appreciate why Gabbard is engaging in such pitiful tactics, as her job likely depends on it. I can even understand why Trump wants to take full advantage of the DNI’s desperation and seize on her “findings.”

Reality, however, is stubborn.

In November 2019, as congressional Democrats finalized their case in Trump’s impeachment, The Associated Press published a rather brutal analysis that highlighted the “mountain of evidence” that was uncontested and “beyond dispute.” From the AP’s article:

Trump explicitly ordered U.S. government officials to work with his personal attorney Rudy Giuliani on matters related to Ukraine, a country deeply dependent on Washington’s help to fend off Russian aggression. The Republican president pushed Ukraine to launch investigations into political rivals, leaning on a discredited conspiracy theory his own advisers disputed. And both American and Ukrainian officials feared that Trump froze a much-needed package of military aid until Kyiv announced it was launching those probes.

Those facts were confirmed by a dozen witnesses, mostly staid career government officials who served both Democratic and Republican administrations. They relied on emails, text messages and contemporaneous notes to back up their recollections from the past year.

Around the same time, Eugene Robinson added in a Washington Post column, “After this week’s impeachment testimony, if Republicans continue to insist that Dear Leader President Trump did absolutely nothing wrong — and they might do just that — then the GOP has surrendered any claim to being a political party. It would be a full-fledged cult of personality.”

Gabbard’s latest gambit didn’t explain away what’s been exposed, because she couldn’t: Trump extorted a U.S. ally in the hope that it would help him cheat in an election. That’s what the evidence showed in 2019, and nothing the DNI presented this week changes the facts.

While it’s easy to forget years later, even several Republicans agreed that Trump did exactly what he was accused of having done. Then-Sen. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee conceded his party’s president “crossed the line”; Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska described the president’s behavior as “shameful and wrong”; and then-Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah said Trump was “guilty of an appalling abuse of public trust.”

Gabbard is apparently eager to play her part, helping Trump rewrite the story and concoct a satisfying counternarrative. The president will no doubt make a fresh push to get GOP lawmakers to wipe the slate clean.

But for those who care about accountability and the truth, the DNI’s efforts should be recognized as misguided nonsense.

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