No. It never was, or is okay to politize the DOJ. Which is why Obama is being referred to the DOJ.
He's being referred to the DOJ because Gabbard apparently can't tell the difference between hacking a vote count and other forms of influencing an election.
For reference, here's Gabbard memo on the subject:
The vast majority of her claims about things that didn't happen have to do with hacking of voting machines, which, as we can all remember and, as that memo makes clear on page 8, was only one of the potential attack vectors they intended to investigate, yet throughout the document, she conflates hacking of voting machines with other means of influence. It's a pretty crude bait and switch that isn't even hard to spot.
She also apparently has some trouble reading a calendar and reading passages of text in context. Here's a section from page 9:
• December 16, 2016 — Though President Obama admits there is no “evidence of machines being tampered with” during the election, he says he was concerned that potential hacks “could hamper vote counting and affect the actual election process.”
“What I was concerned about in particular was making sure that [Wikileaks/Clinton emails] wasn’t compounded by potential hacking that could hamper vote counting and affect the actual election process itself. And so in early September, when I saw President Putin in China, I felt that the most effective way to ensure that, that didn’t happen was to talk to him directly. And tell him to cut it out.” – President Obama on hacking the vote.
Reality: Multiple IC assessments before and after the election consistently showed no credible reporting of Russian intent or capability to do what President Obama alleges.
That sure does sound damning...
if you skip over the dates
and you don't bother to look up what he said immediately following that passage.
First, the dates. Yes, this quote from Obama was made on Dec 16, but he's clearly retelling an event that happened in September - specifically
Sep 4-5, which in the chronology of the Gabbard memo, would put it earlier than all but one of the events she listed. So, contrary to her implications, when he had concern that Putin would hack the elections, the IC had mostly not already determined that Russia couldn't/wouldn't/didn't do that.
Second, the context.
Here's the full transcript of that press conference.
And here's the relevant passage, emphasis added:
Now, with respect to how this thing unfolded last year, let’s just go through the facts pretty quickly. At the beginning of the summer, we’re alerted to the possibility that the DNC has been hacked, and I immediately order law enforcement as well as our intelligence teams to find out everything about it, investigate it thoroughly, to brief the potential victims of this hacking, to brief on a bipartisan basis the leaders of both the House and the Senate and the relevant intelligence committees. And once we had clarity and certainty around what, in fact, had happened, we publicly announced that, in fact, Russia had hacked into the DNC.
And at that time, we did not attribute motives or any interpretations of why they had done so. We didn’t discuss what the effects of it might be. We simply let people know -- the public know, just as we had let members of Congress know -- that this had happened.
And as a consequence, all of you wrote a lot of stories about both what had happened, and then you interpreted why that might have happened and what effect it was going to have on the election outcomes. We did not. And the reason we did not was because in this hyper-partisan atmosphere, at a time when my primary concern was making sure that the integrity of the election process was not in any way damaged, at a time when anything that was said by me or anybody in the White House would immediately be seen through a partisan lens, I wanted to make sure that everybody understood we were playing this thing straight -- that we weren’t trying to advantage one side or another, but what we were trying to do was let people know that this had taken place, and so if you started seeing effects on the election, if you were trying to measure why this was happening and how you should consume the information that was being leaked, that you might want to take this into account.
And that's exactly how we should have handled it. Imagine if we had done the opposite. It would have become immediately just one more political scrum. And part of the goal here was to make sure that we did not do the work of the leakers for them by raising more and more questions about the integrity of the election right before the election was taking place -- at a time, by the way, when the President-elect himself was raising questions about the integrity of the election.
And, finally, I think it's worth pointing out that the information was already out. It was in the hands of WikiLeaks, so that was going to come out no matter what. What I was concerned about, in particular, was making sure that that wasn’t compounded by potential hacking that could hamper vote counting, affect the actual election process itself.
And so in early September, when I saw President Putin in China, I felt that the most effective way to ensure that that didn’t happen was to talk to him directly and tell him to cut it out, and there were going to be some serious consequences if he didn’t. And, in fact, we did not see further tampering of the election process. But the leaks through WikiLeaks had already occurred.
So yeah, this is nonsense and Gabbard, Trump et al are trying to weaponize the DOJ.
