{"id":288563,"date":"2025-07-24T18:29:11","date_gmt":"2025-07-24T18:29:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/288563\/"},"modified":"2025-07-24T18:29:11","modified_gmt":"2025-07-24T18:29:11","slug":"justice-department-forms-strike-force-to-investigate-obama-over-2016-election-trump-administration","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/288563\/","title":{"rendered":"Justice department forms \u2018strike force\u2019 to investigate Obama over 2016 election | Trump administration"},"content":{"rendered":"

The US justice department has formed a \u201cstrike force\u201d to investigate claims that the Obama administration<\/a> carried out a \u201ctreasonous conspiracy\u201d by using false intelligence to suggest Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election to help Donald Trump<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Pam Bondi<\/a>, the US attorney general, announced<\/a> the new force\u2019s formation after the release of a trove of declassified documents from Barack Obama\u2019s national security team by the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard.<\/p>\n

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 \u201can unprecedented and clear abuse of power\u201d by Obama\u2019s administration.<\/p>\n

\u201cFor 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,\u201d the senators said in a statement.<\/p>\n

Gabbard has alleged that Obama and his senior officials concocted a \u201cyears long coup\u201d against Trump \u2013 manifested in a special counsel investigation and FBI inquiries \u2013 by \u201cmanufacturing\u201d intelligence in the weeks after Trump\u2019s 2016 victory over Hillary Clinton that was meant to show collusion between his campaign and Russia<\/a>.<\/p>\n

She has recommended that criminal charges be pressed, including against Obama himself.Trumphas embraced her argument<\/a> and has said Gabbard\u2019s findings reveal \u201cirrefutable proof\u201d of treason.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe 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,\u201d Bondi said in a statement.<\/p>\n

Fox News <\/a> cited a source close to Bondi\u2019s strike force as saying no serious lead is off the table.<\/p>\n

However, any moves to prosecute Obama are likely to be stymied by last year\u2019s US supreme court ruling<\/a> granting presidents broad immunity from criminal prosecution for acts committed in the course of their presidential duties.<\/p>\n

The ruling was widely viewed as favoring Trump, who has faced criminal investigations for acts committed in his first presidency \u2013 including the retention of classified documents. Ironically, it may now form an obstacle to Trump\u2019s stated desire to pursue \u201cretribution\u201d against his political opponents.<\/p>\n

Obama\u2019s office issued a rare statement on Tuesday, calling the allegations \u201coutrageous\u201d and \u201cridiculous\u201d.<\/p>\n

Several others named in Gabbard\u2019s 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\u2019s former deputy Andrew McCabe, ex-national security adviser Susan Rice, John Kerry, the former secretary of state, and Loretta Lynch, the then attorney general.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

During his first presidency, Trump publicly accepted the FBI\u2019s findings that Russia had sought to interfere in the 2016 race, although he also publicly accepted Putin\u2019s denials<\/a> of the US intelligence community conclusions at a 2018 summit in Helsinki. An 1,000-page Senate intelligence committee report <\/a>in 2020 also found that Russia had intervened on Trump\u2019s behalf, noting that Trump\u2019s campaign chair had regular contact with a Russian intelligence officer.<\/p>\n

But in Wednesday\u2019s White House appearance, Gabbard unveiled the declassification of a 2020 report from the House of Representatives\u2019 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

These included revelations of \u201cpossible criminal acts\u201d and emails from a hacking of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) showing that she suffered from \u201cpsycho-emotional problems\u201d, and \u201cuncontrolled fits of anger, aggression, and cheerfulness\u201d. She was also supposedly on a daily regimen of \u201cheavy tranquilizers\u201d.<\/p>\n

Gabbard also alleges that an intelligence community assessment of Putin\u2019s efforts deliberately excluded \u201csignificant\u201d intelligence that contradicted the key findings of Russia\u2019s purported preference for Trump.<\/p>\n

Clinton has previously suggested<\/a> that Gabbard \u2013 a former Democrat member of Congress \u2013 was being \u201cgroomed\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

Her report appears to misrepresent aspects of the intelligence agencies\u2019 assessments of Russia\u2019s 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\u2019s campaign \u2013 activity that Trump publicly encouraged at the time.<\/p>\n

While Obama\u2019s national security officials have remained silent on the matter, some intelligence veterans have criticized Gabbard\u2019s effort.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Trump Admin\u2019s politicization of the \u2018intelligence community\u2019 is very troubling. Every admin wishes they could do it, and several succeed, but this cohort is off to a flying start,\u201d Fulton Armstrong, a former CIA analyst and national intelligence officer, wrote in an email. \u201cIt\u2019s not an entirely new trick \u2013 books have been cooked for decades \u2013 but it\u2019s now institutionalized and, as Tulsi\u2019s behavior shows, encouraged.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The US justice department has formed a \u201cstrike force\u201d to investigate claims that the Obama administration carried out…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":288564,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[12,26],"class_list":{"0":"post-288563","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world","8":"tag-news","9":"tag-world"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114909634100207983","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/288563","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=288563"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/288563\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/288564"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=288563"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=288563"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=288563"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}