The Gabbard Files: "Zombie Food" for the Feed
The Trump Administration has perfected a particular type of political content drop: take a pile of documents, strip them of context, pace the release for maximum drama, and narrate it with insinuations that travel faster than any correction. It’s part opposition research dump, part conspiracy serial, and the audience — which actively participates in the process by “investigating” and interpreting the document dumps — knows the beats by heart. The format has been used so often it might as well be a governing style — the Second Trump Administration is the Files Presidency. We’ve had the JFK Files, the MLK Files, promises of a State Department Files. When Elon Musk (originator of the “Twitter Files”) ran DOGE, even completely public documents and grant databases, such as from USAID, got refashioned as Files.
One set of Files, of course, remains conspicuously un-released: the Epstein Files. In the Administration’s ongoing avoid delivering on its promise of that set, this month instead brought an unexpected new installment: the Gabbard Files.
What Gabbard is Alleging
If you’ve not been following the news, DNI Tulsi Gabbard recently alleged that President Barack Obama is guilty of a “treasonous conspiracy”: launching a “multi-year coup” targeting Trump. From the ODNI podium she claimed that Obama directed the creation of a false intelligence product — alleging that the 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA), which described Russian interference in the 2016 election, manipulated intelligence to reach its judgment about a Kremlin preference for Trump.
To support this claim, she’s pointed to a newly-declassified barrage of material, including emails, a 2020 GOP House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence review (which she claims shows that Russia actually wanted Clinton to win because it didn’t leak as much bad stuff on her as it could have), and an “annex” to the Durham investigation into Russian collusion (implying that Clinton also had some kind of “plan” related to this alleged coup). She also nodded to a purported “whistleblower” who wrote a complaint about the Steele Dossier (which was referenced in an annex to the ICA) and argued that since the ICA highlighted that Russian media didn’t like Clinton, it should also have mentioned that British media didn’t like Trump.
Attorney General Pam Bondi has now opened a grand jury probe to examine potential crimes tied to the alleged conspiracy, with the White House teasing indictments.
But.
The problem is that neither the Steele Dossier nor the 2017 ICA triggered the collusion investigation — it had begun six months prior, in July 2016, following a tip from Australian intelligence. As far as Russian interference, multiple investigations, including the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report that then-Sen. Marco Rubio helped release, corroborated the apparent preference. I personally looked at the data surrounding the Internet Research Agency social media disinformation campaign during the 2016 election; Russia boosted Trump in the primary over Rubio and Cruz (among other things). They clearly had a preference. Vladimir Putin said he had a preference. This had not previously been particularly controversial.
Nonetheless, to relitigate reality, Gabbard has taken the Files approach. Her document drops are a DDoS of the discourse, not transparency; she’s been going so far as to cut sentences from declassified emails in half, knowing that very few people in her target audience will push back.
Frames beat Facts in the “Files” Game
The point of the Gabbard Files is not to clarify the record. It’s to create a preferred reality: assemble a stack of documents (some old, some selectively redacted, some stripped of context), pace the releases for maximum drama and the appearance of an unfolding scandal, and narrate each drop with an insinuation dark enough to overshadow any correction. Every Files season needs a protagonist on a hero’s journey; fighting “the Deep State” is well-trod, but continues to play well with the base.
Frames beat facts in the Files economy. The average person won’t read the litany of heavily-redacted documents. The vast majority of the public doesn’t know the context; there are investigations and investigations-of-investigations related to Russian interference and Russian collusion going back nearly a decade now, and most people have forgotten the timeline of what happened nine years ago, if they even paid attention then.
Frames are quick and easy: “No proof of hacked machines, therefore no interference.” “Russia really wanted Hillary!” “It was a treasonous conspiracy.’” These are not conclusions supported by evidence; they’re slogans. What’s being offered as proof isn’t receipts — it’s props. You can screenshot any PDF, highlight some words in yellow with red underline, and watch the bite-sized claim metastasize across platforms. Selectively-cropped emails and decontextualized half-sentences are useful for bold insinuations; they tell a very different story when you read them in full, but Gabbard is banking on her audience dismissing the media that does so. The Files genre is durable because it’s entertaining, because it flatters its target audience as insiders, and because it exploits the gap between what’s technically true and what’s contextually real. And the rapid-fire nature of the sweeping allegations makes any attempt at correction feel pedantic — “well, actually, the full sentence in this email reads…” struggles to compete with “treasonous conspiracy!”
This is propaganda 101. Trump administration insiders are reportedly calling this content “zombie food”; it feeds the audience’s need for sensationalism. Fake allegations shamble through the discourse, crowding out more important things — or, in this case, distracting from the Epstein debacle splitting the MAGA base.
I’m not under any illusion that fact-checking propaganda undoes its effect. Nonetheless, trying to inject facts into the conversation is still important — Grok, after all, needs material to process to answer “is this true?” Community Notes writers need something to point to. I did read all of the Gabbard Files docs, and wrote an explainer for Lawfare walking through what’s actually in them — and what isn’t. I broke it into sections; if you want to skip ahead to the “HPSCI memo” (the one they claim proves Russia really wanted Hillary), go for it. Or you might want to focus on the “Durham annex” — emails that Special Counsel John Durham dismissed as likely forgeries by Russian intelligence in his own investigation, but which FBI Director Kash Patel now wants you to believe were ‘hidden in burn bags in a secret room in the FBI’.
Since longform isn’t for everyone and this stuff is hard to follow, I spent last week chatting about the topic with people across the political spectrum — on Richard Hanania’s pod, with Matt Sheffield over at Flux, on NPR’s All Things Considered, etc. This approach is maybe more entertaining, and the hosts all asked good questions that a lot of people in their audiences have. So, that’s video and audio content.
Perhaps quaintly, given that I spent some summers working at CIA when I was in college, I still believe it’s important to keep national security and intelligence analysis as non-partisan as possible. Selective declassification over analyst objections for short-term political point-scoring, particularly with egregiously-inaccurate frames, doesn’t just mislead the public in the moment. It chills potential sources and intelligence-sharing, corrodes the record future policymakers rely on, and results in audiences mistaking weaponized snippets for truth. The real cost of governing by Files is not just today’s outrage—it’s the trust and capacity we can’t easily replace.