Donald Trump’s intelligence director Tulsi Gabbard ranted about a “coup” supposedly launched by Barack Obama at a White House briefing on Wednesday as the Trump administration returns to the “Russiagate” investigation as a lifeline for an embattled president.
Trump is facing the loudest uproar from his base in years over his administration’s efforts to tamp down on speculation surrounding the death and crimes of Jeffrey Epstein, a convicted pedophile.
In early July, the Department of Justice and FBI declared in a joint statement that no “client list” detailing Epstein’s co-conspirators could be found within the DOJ’s files; the statement also reiterated the agencies’ conclusion that Epstein died by suicide in 2019.
On Wednesday, the president’s weeks-long effort to find a distraction to turn his base’s focus from that statement resulted in the director of the U.S. intelligence community declaring behind the White House podium that former president Barack Obama ordered intelligence assessments to be doctored to include the assertion that Russia was working directly to elect Donald Trump.
Gabbard called the investigation into Trump’s 2016 campaign a years-long “coup” orchestrated by the former president, something that Obama dismissively rejected in a rare statement this week condemning the Trump administration’s latest claims.
“There is irrefutable evidence that detailed how President Obama and his national security team directed the creation of an intelligence community assessment that they knew was false,” Gabbard told reporters.
“They manufactured findings from shoddy sources, they suppressed evidence and credible intelligence that disproved their false claims. They disobeyed traditional trade craft intelligence community standards, and withheld the truth from the American people. In doing so, they conspired to subvert the will of the American people,” she continued.
Gabbard’s report, released last week, closely followed an article from the Wall Street Journal purporting to contain a note from Trump to Jeffrey Epstein as part of the latter’s 50th birthday celebration in 2003. The note, framed as an imagined dialogue between the two men, alludes to a shared “secret” between the two. The U.S. president strongly denied the note’s authenticity.
With the Jeffrey Epstein saga consuming more and more of the media atmosphere every day, the White House turned late last week to Barack Obama and the FBI investigation into his first campaign for the presidency as Trump’s aides seek to move the news cycle along.
The memo authored by Gabbard last week, which she summarized on Tuesday, accuses the Obama administration of lying to the American public about Russia’s supposed interest in seeing Trump elected. In reality, straight-news coverage of the 2016 election largely centered around the reality, verified by both the FBI’s special counsel investigation headed up by Robert Mueller and a bipartisan probe conducted by the Senate Intelligence Committee. Russian-backed hackers struck the servers of the Democratic National Committee in 2016, then published those materials online in an effort to damage the candidacy of Hillary Clinton. Russian influence campaigns on social media spanned a wide range of efforts including backing Trump, opposing Clinton, and disseminating misinformation.
Gabbard’s memo also mischaracterized the general assessment of the American intelligence community in 2016: that Russian intelligence agents had not attemped to directly influence vote totals through the hacking of election infrastructure, a finding which her office seemed to conflate with an absence of any Russian influence efforts altogether.
On Wednesday, the director of national intelligence backed away from that conflation entirely. She and White House press secretary insisted that it was the Trump administration’s view that Russian actors had interfered in the 2016 election through the use of social media botnets and other means to sow “distrust and chaos”, but without any clear goal or motive. There was no explanation to what end Russia was supposedly sowing “distrust and chaos”, by hacking the servers of one major political party and not the other, if not with the aim of benefiting the party not forced to explain damaging internal emails which fueled accusations from Clinton’s critics in the party that the DNC establishment favored her.
Gabbard also dodged questions about what steps the Trump administration would take from here, or why the president and his allies had waited until statutes of limitations had likely expired on any criminal charges that could rise from the matter (were Trump’s allegations of misconduct actually true).
She referred questions about possible criminal charges to the Department of Justice and Attorney General Pam Bondi, whose own future in the administration is already on possibly shaky ground as the criticism of her declaration about the Epstein case continues to fester.
Neither she nor Leavitt could explain why the Senate Intelligence Committee (including now-Secretary of State Marco Rubio) did not find that the Obama administration had improperly changed any ODNI assessments in its report released in 2020.
Justice Department officials have been notably quiet amid the clamoring from the White House for retribution against Obama and top members of his administration, including Clinton, his director of national intelligence James Clapper, and FBI director James Comey. Bondi has announced no plans to launch a new investigation into the matter, and Gabbard herself can only refer evidence to the DoJ for review.
Meanwhile, the House of Representatives is leaving town early this week to dodge a vote on a bipartisan resolution that would force the administration to release the Epstein files, and Trump is increasingly swinging at longer and longer lists of his perceived foes as the pressure from his base ramps up and accusations of a cover-up grow louder.
In a now-deleted Truth Social post, Trump even bashed his supporters who support calls to investigate Epstein’s accomplices “weak” and claimed he didn’t need their support.
