On Wednesday, MSNBC’s Morning Joe co-host Jonathan Lemire dismissed the recent release of documents regarding Russian interference in the 2016 election. Instead of actually getting to the root of the issue that the documents were addressing, Lemire decided to call Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard's findings a “conspiracy theory.”
Lemire started the downplaying instantly on the recent Russia assessment:
LEMIRE: You’re right, there’s nothing new here. The DNI, who is doing President Trump’s bidding, it would appear, trying to also get back in his good graces after—had a falling out over the strike in Iran. And she was sort of left on the outside of that, is now carrying water here of these unfounded conspiracy theories about what role Obama and his team did in 2016.
Trump claims they lied about Russia's influence in the election. That’s not true, we know that Russia manipulated with social media, you know, and we know Russia was part of the hack into Hillary Clinton’s emails in that campaign, we know Russia did lots of things to try to influence the vote. They didn’t actually go in and change the tally in the electronic ballot boxes and that's what Trump is referring to here.
According to Lemire, people should instantly discredit the document because Gabbard was simply trying to get “back in [Trump’s] good graces” over falling out from the Iran strike, because somehow that connection makes documents untrue. He then went as far as to say the documents are conspiracy theories. For anyone on Morning Joe to accuse someone else of "carrying water" for a political team creates some unintentional hilarity.
Lemire then failed to cite the actual reason why these reports were so important. The real reason being because they showed Russia wasn’t colluding with Trump, but many news outlets and the Obama administration pushed it out anyway.
During an interview with Newsmax on Friday morning, NewsBusters’s own Curtis Houck described the situation perfectly: “The report that Director Gabbard released goes into detail about what is new, the presidential daily brief, the removal of the admission that Russia’s election meddling effort was to sow chaos, not to benefit one candidate over another.”
I sounded off on @Newsmax's 'National Report' this morning about this snide dismissal by MSNBC's Jonathan Lemire of the report released by @DNIGabbard.
— Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) July 25, 2025
In addition to being a hyperpartisan at "The Atlantic," the guy needs some new hobbies. Simply dismissing Russian collusion… pic.twitter.com/FyxubVsJLF
In classic MSNBC fashion, Lemire used the word deflection to deflect from actually reporting real news:
President Trump trying to distract. We have seen for four days an effort, a flailing effort to try to turn the conversation away from the Jeffery Epstein matter, and this is what he settled on, it’s 2016 all over again.
Everyone in the mainstream media thinks it’s impossible for the American people to follow two stories at once, apparently. Lemire was essentially taking the original Obama administration’s findings about the Russian interference as fact and immediately discrediting the new reporting simply because it came from the Trump White House.
Lemire has had a hard relationship with the truth to begin with. At Politico in 2024, he attempted to turn Biden's direct quote, “The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporter’s” into a narrative that he was talking only about the Trump supporters who displayed hatred. Of course, people called him out on this, and he was forced to change the article to actually tell the truth.
