US President Donald Trump on Tuesday accused ex-President Barack Obama of “treason” for allegedly spearheading an operation to falsely link him to Russia and undermine his 2016 presidential campaign.
Obama’s spokesperson criticized Trump’s claims, stating “these strange allegations are ridiculous and a weak distraction effort.”
Whereas Trump has repeatedly attacked Obama by name, the Republican leader has not, since returning to the White House in January, gone as far as to finger his Democratic predecessor with accusations of criminal activity.
In comments in the Oval Office, Trump pounced on remarks by his intelligence chief, Tulsi Gabbard, on Friday in which she threatened to send Obama administration officials to the Justice Department for prosecution for sending an intelligence report on Russian meddling in the 2016 election.
She released declassified documents, claiming they proved a “treasonous conspiracy” by top Obama officials in 2016, aimed at undermining Trump. Democrats, however, immediately dismissed her accusations as false and driven by politics.
“It’s there, he’s guilty. This was treason,” Trump declared on Tuesday, but he did not provide evidence for his assertions. “They tried to steal the election; they tried to obfuscate the election. They did things that nobody’s ever imagined, even in other countries.”
A January 2017 report by the U.S. intelligence community concluded that Russia, through social media disinformation, Russian bot farms, and hacking, aimed to harm Democrat Hillary Clinton’s campaign and support Trump. The report found that the real effect was probably minimal and had no proof that Moscow’s efforts altered elections.
A 2020 report by the Senate intelligence committee, which was bipartisan, had discovered that Russia employed Republican political consultant Paul Manafort, the WikiLeaks website and others to attempt to influence the 2016 election in Trump’s favor.
“Nothing in the document released last week (by Gabbard) undermines the widely accepted conclusion that Russia worked to influence the 2016 presidential election but did not successfully alter any votes,” Obama spokesperson Patrick Rodenbush said in a statement.
Trump Under Pressure
Trump, who has a track record of boosting false conspiracy theories, has repeatedly assailed the evaluations as a “hoax.” He recently retweeted on his Truth Social handle a spurious claim asserting Obama being handcuffed and arrested in the Oval Office.
Trump has been attempting to shift attention away from the topic after he was forced by his conservative base to provide more information regarding Jeffrey Epstein, who took his own life in 2019 as he was facing trial on sex trafficking accusations. Supporters of the conspiracy theories surrounding Epstein called on Trump, who socialized with the fallen financier in the 1990s and early 2000s, to release investigative reports into the case.
Trump was queried in the Oval Office regarding Epstein and jumped immediately into a denunciation of Obama and Clinton.
“The witch hunt that you ought to be discussing is they caught President Obama absolutely cold.” Trump stated.
Trump hinted at taking action against Obama and his past officials, labeling the investigation into Russia a traitorous act and the former president guilty of “trying to stage a coup.”
“It’s time to begin, after what they did to me, and whether it’s right or wrong, it’s time to go after individuals. Obama has been caught directly,” he said.
Democratic Rep. Jim Himes replied on X: “This is a lie. And if he’s confused, the President should ask @SecRubio, who assisted in the bipartisan Senate investigation that unanimously found that there was no evidence of politicization in the behavior of the intelligence community with respect to the 2016 election.
Former Republican Senator Marco Rubio is now Trump’s secretary of state.
Since his return to office, Trump has denounced his political adversaries whom he accuses of weaponizing the federal government against him and his supporters for the January 6, 2021, attack of the U.S. Capitol by his supporters and his management of classified documents following his exit from office in 2021.
Attacks on Predecessors
Obama has been a target of Trump’s for a long time. In 2011 he falsely accused then-President Obama of being born outside the United States, so Obama released a copy of his birth certificate. Over the past few months, Trump has hardly ever hesitated in his rhetorical attacks on his two Democratic predecessors in a manner all but without precedent in the modern era.
Gabbard’s accusation that Obama colluded to overthrow Trump’s 2016 election by manufacturing intelligence about Russian interference is refuted by a CIA analysis requested by Director John Ratcliffe and released on July 2, a bipartisan Senate report issued in 2018, and declassified documents released by Gabbard last week.
The reports demonstrate that Gabbard mixed up two distinct U.S. intelligence conclusions in claiming that Obama and his national security advisers altered a determination that Russia likely was not attempting to interfere in the election by cyber means.
One of the findings was that Russia was not attempting to break into U.S. election systems to alter vote count and the second was that Moscow likely was employing cyber methods to affect the U.S. political landscape with information and propaganda efforts, including by stealing and publishing information from Democratic Party servers.
The January 2017 U.S. intelligence report commissioned by Obama drew on that second conclusion: that Russian President Vladimir Putin directed influence activities to shape the 2016 election to Trump.
The review ordered by Ratcliffe identified errors in the production of that analysis. It did not challenge its findings and sustained “the quality and credibility” of a highly classified CIA analysis on which the authors of the assessment had depended.
