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“President Donald Trump accused former President Barack Obama of ‘treason’ on Tuesday, accusing him, without providing evidence, of leading an effort to falsely tie him to Russia and undermine his 2016 presidential campaign. A spokesperson for Obama denounced Trump's claims, saying ‘these bizarre allegations are ridiculous and a weak attempt at distraction.’…
“During remarks in the Oval Office, Trump leaped on comments from his intelligence chief, Tulsi Gabbard, on Friday in which she threatened to refer Obama administration officials to the Justice Department for prosecution over an intelligence assessment of Russian interference in the 2016 election. She declassified documents and said the information she was releasing showed a ‘treasonous conspiracy’ in 2016 by top Obama administration officials to undermine Trump.” Reuters
The left criticizes Trump’s post about Obama, and argues that Gabbard’s memo is misleading.
“Battling for position with his MAGA base, which is furious over his inaction on the so-called Epstein files, Trump has resorted to an old tactic: distraction. He has raised another conspiracy theory to change the subject away from a different conspiracy theory. But in sharing the video [depicting Obama being arrested], which was created by another user, he is sinking to a new low, even for the president who encouraged crowds to chant ‘Lock her up!’ about his 2016 political opponent…
“No political rival seems to capture Trump’s imagination like Obama…The video is a return to a theme that helped him break through with the conspiracy-minded Tea Party voters who would become his base. Then, it was birtherism. Now it is fake Obama being fake arrested. The throughline is that Obama, the nation’s first Black president, is somehow illegitimate.”
Nia-Malika Henderson, Bloomberg
“A U.S. intelligence assessment in early 2017 [concluded] that Russia had tried to skew the outcome of the election in favor of Trump. Russia orchestrated a leak of stolen emails from the Democratic National Committee and created fake social media accounts. The 2020 Senate committee investigation, which interviewed more than 200 witnesses and reviewed a million documents over three years, came to the same conclusion…
“Trump’s secretary of state, Marco Rubio, signed off on the committee’s findings at the time, when he was acting chair of the Intelligence Committee. The committee found no evidence of ‘collusion’ between the Trump campaign and Russia, Rubio said in a statement after the report was released. But he added: ‘What the Committee did find however is very troubling. We found irrefutable evidence of Russian meddling.’”
Dan De Luce, NBC News
“The ICA’s finding that Russia had clandestinely interfered in the election to assist Trump was a separate matter from… the possibility that Russian operatives would monkey-wrench vote-counting systems and throw Election Day into chaos. That had been a worry for the Obama administration throughout 2016, after it received reports that Russian intelligence had penetrated and probed election boards in several states…
“Yet in this memo, Gabbard applies intelligence reporting on the potential election tampering to an entirely separate issue: the Russian attack that included the operation that hacked Democratic targets and released their emails to impede the Clinton campaign, and that ran an influence operation through secret social media efforts to denigrate Clinton and boost Trump. These are two different matters… Gabbard is deliberately misleading the public about the intelligence she cites.”
David Corn, Mother Jones
The right generally argues that the Obama administration pushed misleading stories about Trump and Russia.
The right generally argues that the Obama administration pushed misleading stories about Trump and Russia.
“Russia habitually tries to influence American politics, including electoral politics, just as our government has for decades intruded in the politics of the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia… Russia’s efforts in this regard, and specifically in 2016, have been laughably ineffective; that doesn’t mean they haven’t happened at all…
“The Democrats’ caterwauling that Russia stole the 2016 election from Clinton was nonsense. It has long been widely recognized for what it was: a fever dream by which Democrats sought to avoid conceding the true cause of the party’s loss… Yet, by claiming that there was no evidence of Russian interference, the Trump camp invites correction (including, now, from the Trump administration’s own CIA) and thereby turns into a matter of consequence something that was utterly inconsequential.”
Andrew C. McCarthy, National Review
“[Gabbard’s memo] describes a White House meeting on December 9, 2016, that was presided over by President Obama…
“Following that meeting, the tenor of Obama administration communications on Russian ‘interference’ in the election changed. It became more alarmist, and administration officials leaked assessments of Russia’s activity that were exaggerated and claimed, without any strong support, that Russia had ‘interfered’ in the election in order to help Donald Trump win…
“But I see no indication that Obama and his minions said anything that contradicted the intelligence assessment that Russia did not attack infrastructure so as to alter election results… So on balance, I don’t think the most recent revelations from the DNI add much to our understanding of the Democrats’ partisan misuse of intelligence.”
John Hinderaker, Power Line Blog
“Obama and his national security team ‘manufactured and politicized’ phony intelligence to help frame Donald Trump as a Russian asset when they knew it was untrue… [Then-CIA Director John] Brennan’s handwritten notes from the Situation Room show how he recounted [Hillary] Clinton’s plan ‘to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by the Russian security service.’…
“Almost from the outset, the FBI had debunked the dossier and later fired its author, Christopher Steele, for lying. The ex-British spy had been a paid source for the FBI. By concealing this vital information, [then-FBI Director James] Comey sought and obtained surveillance warrants from the FISA court on a Trump campaign associate, Carter Page. No evidence of wrongdoing was ever discovered because none existed.”
Gregg Jarrett, Fox News
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