- Under pressure from Epstein, Trump launches the attack.
- It was alleged that Russia sought to harm Clinton.
- Obama has long been a Trump target.
US President Donald Trump accused former president Barack Obama of “betrayal” on Tuesday, accusing him, without providing evidence, of carrying out an effort to wrongly attach 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 attempted distraction”.
While Trump frequently attacked Obama by name, the republican president has not, since his return in January, has gone so far by pointing the finger of his democratic predecessor with allegations of criminal action.
During the remarks of the Oval Office, Trump jumped on the comments of his intelligence chief, Tulsi Gabbard, on Friday in which she threatened to refer to Obama administration officials at the Ministry of Justice for the proceedings for an assessment of Russian interference in the 2016 elections.
She declared documents and said that the information she published showed a “plot betrayal” in 2016 by senior officials from the Obama administration to Saper Trump, said the Democrats called for false and politically motivation.
“It is there, he is guilty. It was a betrayal,” said Trump on Tuesday, although he has no evidence of his statements. “They tried to steal the elections, they tried to obscure the elections. They did things that no one has ever imagined, even in other countries.”
An assessment of the American intelligence community published in January 2017 concluded that Russia, using disinformation of social media, hacking and Russian robot farms, sought to harm the campaign of the Hillary Clinton Democrat and to strengthen Trump. The evaluation determined that the real impact was probably limited and has shown no evidence that Moscow’s efforts have changed the voting results.
A bipartite report in 2020 of the senatorial intelligence committee found that Russia used the republican political operator Paul Manfort, the Wikileaks and others website to try to influence the 2016 elections to help Trump’s campaign.
“Nothing in the document published last week (by Gabbard) undermines the widely accepted conclusion that Russia worked to influence the 2016 presidential election but failed to manipulate votes,” said Obama spokesman Patrick Rodenbush in a statement.
Trump under pressure
Trump, who has a story of promoting false conspiracy theories, has often denounced evaluations as a “hoax”. In recent days, Trump has republished his Truth social account a false video showing that Obama was arrested in the handcuffs of the oval office.
Trump sought to divert attention to other problems after being under pressure from his conservative base to disclose more information on Jeffrey Epstein, who died by suicide in 2019 pending a trial on sex trafficking.
The donors of conspiracy theories on Epstein urged Trump, who socialized with the financial financier in the 1990s and the early 2000s, to publish investigation files related to the case.
Trump, asked in the Oval Office on Epstein, quickly pivoted in an attack on Obama and Clinton.
“The witch hunt you should talk about is that they have caught President Obama absolutely cold,” said Trump.
Trump suggested that measures be taken against Obama and his former civil servants, qualifying the investigation in Russia an act of betrayal and the former president guilty of “trying to direct a coup”.
“It’s time to start, after what they did to me, and it’s good or bad, it’s time to continue people. Obama has been directly caught,” he said.
Democratic representative Jim Himes replied on X: “It is a lie. And if he is confused, the president should ask @secrubio, who helped direct the investigation of the Barta -Bartite Senate which unanimously concluded that there was no proof of politicization in the behavior of the intelligence community around the 2016 elections.”
Former Republican senator Marco Rubio is now Trump’s secretary of state.
Since his return to duties, Trump has castigated his political opponents, which he claims to armed the federal government against him and his allies for January 6, 2021, the attack on the American Capitol by his supporters and his management of classified documents after his departure in 2021.
Attacks against predecessors
Obama has long been a Trump target. In 2011, he accused the president of the Obama era of not being born in the United States, which prompted Obama to release a copy of his birth certificate.
In recent months, Trump has rarely retained his rhetorical widths against his two Democratic predecessors in an almost unprecedented way in modern times.
He launched an investigation after accumulating former President Joe Biden and his staff, without evidence, of a “conspiracy” to use an autopen, an automated device that reproduces the signature of a person, to sign sensitive documents in the name of the president. Biden rejected the complaint as false and “ridiculous”.
Gabbard’s burden that Obama conspired to overthrow Trump’s elections in 2016 by making information on Russia’s interference is contradicted by a CIA review ordered by director John Ratcliffe and published on July 2, a 2018 Bipartite Senate report and declassified documents that Gabbard was published last week.
The documents show that Gabbard confused two distinct American intelligence conclusions by alleging that Obama and its national security aid modified an assessment that Russia was probably trying to influence the election by cyber means.
A conclusion was that Russia did not try to hack the American electoral infrastructure to change the number of votes, and the second was that Moscow probably used cyber means to influence the American political environment by information and propaganda operations, including steating and leaking data to servers of Democratic Party.
The evaluation of American information in January 2017 ordered by Obama relied on this second observation: that Russian President Vladimir Putin authorized operations to influence the 2016 vote in Trump.
The examination commissioned by Ratcliffe found faults in the production of this evaluation. But he did not challenge his conclusion and confirmed “the quality and credibility” of a highly classified CIA report on which the authors of the evaluation were based.
