The US justice department has formed a “strike force” to investigate claims that the Obama administration carried out a “treasonous conspiracy” by using false intelligence to suggest Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election to help Donald Trump.
Pam Bondi, the US attorney general, announced the new force’s formation on Wednesday after the release of a trove of declassified documents from Barack Obama’s national security team by the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard. The announcement comes as the US president finds himself mired in scandal over the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein, and has tried to distract by pivoting conversation to retribution against his political enemies.
On Thursday, two Republican senators, Lindsey Graham and John Cornyn, both members of the judiciary committee, called on Bondi to appoint a special counsel into what they called “an unprecedented and clear abuse of power” by the Obama administration.
“For the good of the country, we urge Attorney General Bondi to appoint a special counsel to investigate the extent to which former President Obama, his staff and administration officials manipulated the US national security apparatus for a political outcome,” the senators said in a statement.
Gabbard has alleged that Obama and his senior officials concocted a “years long coup” against Trump – manifested in a special counsel investigation and FBI inquiries – by “manufacturing” intelligence in the weeks after Trump’s 2016 victory over Hillary Clinton that was meant to show collusion between his campaign and Russia.
She has recommended that criminal charges be pressed, including against Obama himself. Trump has embraced her argument and has said Gabbard’s findings reveal “irrefutable proof” of treason.
Bondi set the scene for a justice department investigation after Gabbard presented what she claimed was evidence of a crime at a White House news conference on Wednesday.
“The Department of Justice is proud to work with my friend Director Gabbard and we are grateful for her partnership in delivering accountability for the American people. We will investigate these troubling disclosures fully and leave no stone unturned to deliver justice,” Bondi said in a statement.
Fox News cited a source close to Bondi’s strike force as saying no serious lead is off the table.
However, any moves to prosecute Obama are likely to be stymied by last year’s US supreme court ruling granting presidents broad immunity from criminal prosecution for acts committed in the course of their presidential duties.
The ruling was widely viewed as favoring Trump, who has faced criminal investigations for acts committed in his first presidency – including the retention of classified documents. Ironically, it may now form an obstacle to Trump’s stated desire to pursue “retribution” against his political opponents.
Obama’s office issued a rare statement on Tuesday, calling the allegations “outrageous” and “ridiculous”.
Several others named in Gabbard’s document could be targeted. They include James Clapper, her predecessor as director of national intelligence; John Brennan, the former CIA director; James Comey, who was FBI director until he was fired by Trump; Comey’s former deputy Andrew McCabe; ex-national security adviser Susan Rice; John Kerry, the former secretary of state; and Loretta Lynch, the former attorney general.
Brennan has already been the subject of a criminal referral by the current CIA director, John Ratcliffe. Kash Patel, the FBI director, has opened a criminal investigation into Brennan and Comey, according to Fox News, although its scope is unclear.
During his first presidency, Trump publicly accepted the FBI’s findings that Russia had sought to interfere in the 2016 race, although he also publicly accepted Putin’s denials of the US intelligence community conclusions at a 2018 summit in Helsinki. A 1,000-page Senate intelligence committee report in 2020 also found that Russia had intervened on Trump’s behalf, noting that Trump’s campaign chair had regular contact with a Russian intelligence officer.
But in Wednesday’s White House appearance, Gabbard unveiled the declassification of a 2020 report from the House of Representatives’ intelligence committee, which she said showed that the goal of Russian meddling was to undermine faith in the US electoral process rather than to help Trump.
The report found that Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, did not plan to leak the most damaging material about Clinton until after the election, Gabbard said.
These included revelations of “possible criminal acts” and emails from a hacking of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) showing that she suffered from “psycho-emotional problems”, and “uncontrolled fits of anger, aggression, and cheerfulness”. She was also supposedly on a daily regimen of “heavy tranquilizers”.
Gabbard also alleges that an intelligence community assessment of Putin’s efforts deliberately excluded “significant” intelligence that contradicted the key findings of Russia’s purported preference for Trump.
Clinton has previously suggested that Gabbard – a former Democratic member of Congress – was being “groomed” by Russia as a possible presidential candidate. Gabbard, who has no prior intelligence experience, has also been criticized for repeating Kremlin talking points, including after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022.
Her report appears to misrepresent aspects of the intelligence agencies’ assessments of Russia’s meddling in the 2016 race. The assessment found that Russia did not conduct cyber-attacks against election infrastructure to change vote tallies, but hacked and leaked documents from the DNC to damage Clinton’s campaign – activity that Trump publicly encouraged at the time.
While Obama’s national security officials have remained silent on the matter, some intelligence veterans have criticized Gabbard’s effort.
“The Trump Admin’s politicization of the ‘intelligence community’ is very troubling. Every admin wishes they could do it, and several succeed, but this cohort is off to a flying start,” Fulton Armstrong, a former CIA analyst and national intelligence officer, wrote in an email. “It’s not an entirely new trick – books have been cooked for decades – but it’s now institutionalized and, as Tulsi’s behavior shows, encouraged.”
