On Friday’s broadcast of Fox News Channel’s Hannity, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) called for the full release of intelligence documents related to allegations that the Obama administration helped manufacture the now-debunked Trump-Russia collusion narrative during the 2016 election.
Cotton urged Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, along with the CIA and FBI, to release “as much information as possible” to expose what he described as collusion among top Obama-era officials.
“You know, for years, the Democrats screamed collusion falsely about Donald Trump and Russia,” Cotton said. “There was collusion—collusion between Obama and Biden and Clinton, Brennan, Comey, Clapper—to brush under the rug the judgments of these career intelligence officials that there’s no evidence of collusion whatsoever.”
The comments followed an exchange with host Sean Hannity, who cited recently declassified material indicating that intelligence officials knew by December 2016 that no collusion had occurred. Hannity alleged that former President Obama rejected this conclusion and ordered an alternative narrative. According to the discussion, senior officials in the intelligence community objected to rewriting the assessment but were overruled for political reasons.
Cotton said the public was intentionally misled in a coordinated effort to delegitimize President Trump’s election victory. He accused Obama-era leaders of corrupting the intelligence process and manipulating public opinion.
“The American people deserve to know exactly what happened,” Cotton said. “The DNI, CIA, and FBI should continue to put out as much information as possible, as quickly as possible.”
Cotton has long called for accountability over the Russia investigation, which Republicans have criticized as a partisan operation aimed at undermining President Trump from the beginning of his term.
