Attorney General Pam Bondi convened a grand jury investigation centered around the “Russiagate” probe on Monday, the latest bid by Donald Trump to wage war against Barack Obama for the FBI investigation of his first presidential campaign.
The direction by Bondi does not mean that charges for Obama or members of his team are imminent. Instead, the move allows prosecutors to issue embarrassing subpoenas and gather testimony, while launching a fishing expedition.
CNN first reported Bondi’s direction that the investigation be launched Monday afternoon, citing a source familiar. The Justice Department declined to comment on the record to the news channel. The Independent has reached out for comment.
It’s still unclear what crimes members of the Trump administration believe were specifically committed regarding the investigation into the ties between Donald Trump’s campaign and Russia. Tulsi Gabbard’s ODNI memo is the only document publicly alleging any wrongdoing by members of the Obama administration surrounding the investigation, which a previous DoJ review led by John Durham already probed.
In July, Gabbard published a memo which she later outlined at a White House press conference accusing former President Barack Obama and his administration of doctoring ODNI assessments containing the intelligence community’s conclusions regarding the extent of Russian involvement in efforts to sway the outcome of the 2016 election. According to Gabbard, the Democratic administration’s top intelligence chiefs, at the behest of the president and his team, changed those conclusions to insinuate Russia’s support for Donald Trump.
But in reality, the intelligence assessments released by the ODNI at the time were backed up by the verifiable facts of the matter: Russian-backed hackers targeted the Democratic National Committee’s servers and published information in an effort to sabotage Hillary Clinton’s campaign and sow discord while performing no similar feats against Republicans or Trump’s campaign.
Trump, meanwhile, ordered his own probe into the origins of the Russia investigation in 2019, which included the appointment of a special counsel at the Justice Department. No charges for members of Obama’s administration were ever pursued or suggested at the time.
The administration hasn’t explained why a bipartisan investigation into the 2016 election similarly concluded that an interference campaign aimed at damaging Clinton’s public image was carried out in 2016, while no such efforts were launched against Trump. That investigation was chaired by Marco Rubio, Trump’s secretary of State and acting national security adviser.
Already seeking alliances with then-first-term-President Trump, Rubio said at the time: “We can say, without any hesitation, that the Committee found absolutely no evidence that then-candidate Donald Trump or his campaign colluded with the Russian government to meddle in the 2016 election.”
“What the Committee did find however is very troubling. We found irrefutable evidence of Russian meddling. And we discovered deeply troubling actions taken by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, particularly their acceptance and willingness to rely on the ‘Steele Dossier’ without verifying its methodology or sourcing,” Rubio argued at the time.
Trump and other members of his administration have suggested that Obama and others are guilty of “treason” over the supposed doctoring of reports. Gabbard claimed that a “coup” was launched by the 44th president, whose successor went on to gather his supporters in Washington where they attacked the United States Capitol in 2021 after he lost the election.
