- Under pressure on Epstein, Trump performs the attack.
- He claimed that Russia sought to harm Clinton.
- Obama has long been a Trump goal.
The president of the United States, Donald Trump, accused former President Barack Obama of “betrayal” on Tuesday, accusing him, without providing evidence, of leading an effort to falsely link him to Russia and undermine his 2016 presidential campaign.
An Obama spokesman denounced Trump's claims, saying: “These strange accusations are ridiculous and a weak attempt of distraction.”
While Trump has frequently attacked Obama by name, the Republican president has not returned to office in January, he came so far when pointing his finger at his Democratic predecessor with accusations of criminal action.
During the comments at the Oval office, Trump jumped to the comments of his intelligence chief, Tulsi Gabbard, on Friday in which he threatened to refer to Obama administration officials to the Department of Justice for prosecution on an intelligence evaluation of Russian interference in the 2016 elections.
He said documents and said that the information he was launching showed a “traitorous conspiracy” in 2016 by the senior officials of the Obama administration to undermine Trump, statements that the Democrats called false and politically motivated.
“It's there, it's guilty. This was betrayal,” Trump said Tuesday, although he offered no proof of his statements. “They tried to steal the elections, tried to obfuscate the elections. They did things that nobody imagined, even in other countries.”
An evaluation of the United States intelligence community published in January 2017 concluded that Russia, using the misinformation of social networks, piracy and Bot Russian farms, sought to damage the campaign of Democrat Hillary Clinton and reinforce Trump. The evaluation determined that the real impact was probably limited and showed no evidence that Moscow's efforts changed the voting results.
A 2020 bipartisan report of the Senate Intelligence Committee discovered that Russia used the Republican political operation Paul Manafort, the Wikileaks website and others to try to influence the 2016 elections to help Trump's campaign.
“Nothing in the document issued last week (by Gabbard) undermines the widely accepted conclusion that Russia worked to influence the 2016 presidential elections, but did not successfully manipulate any vote,” said Obama spokesman Patrick Rodenbush, in a statement.
Trump under pressure
Trump, who has a history of promoting false conspiracy theories, has often denounced evaluations as a “deception.” In recent days, Trump published his real social account again, a false video that shows Obama being arrested handcuffed in the oval office.
Trump has been trying to divert attention to other issues after the pressure of his conservative base to release more information about Jeffrey Epstein, who died from suicide in 2019 while waiting for the trial on sexual trafficking positions.
The sponsors of the theories of conspiracy on Epstein have urged Trump, which socialized with the dishonored financial during the 1990s and early 2000s, to launch research files related to the case.
Trump, asked in the Oval office about Epstein, quickly turned in an attack against Obama and Clinton.
“The witch hunt that you should talk about is that they caught the President Obama absolutely cold,” Trump said.
Trump suggested that measures would be taken against Obama and his former officials, calling Russia's investigation a traitorous act and the former president guilty of “trying to lead a coup d'etat.”
“It's time to start, after what they did to me, and if it is correct or incorrect, it is time to chase people. Obama has been directly trapped,” he said.
Democratic representative Jim Himes responded in X: “This is a lie. And if confused, the president should ask @Secrubio, who helped lead the bipartisan investigation of the Senate that ended unanimously that there was no evidence of politicization in the behavior of the intelligence community around the 2016 elections.”
Former Republican Senator Marco Rubio is now Trump's secretary.
Since he returned to office, Trump has punished his political opponents, who, according to him, armed the federal government against him and his allies for the attack of January 6, 2021 against the United States Capitol by his supporters and their management of classified materials after leaving office in 2021.
Attacks against predecessors
Obama has long been a Trump goal. In 2011, he accused the then President Obama of not being born in the United States, which led Obama to publish a copy of his birth certificate.
In recent months, Trump has rarely been delayed in his rhetoric on the sides against his two Democratic predecessors in a way that is not unprecedented in modern times.
He launched an investigation after accusing former President Joe Biden and his staff, without evidence, of a “conspiracy” to use an automatic pilot, an automated device that replicates the signing of a person, to sign delicate documents on behalf of the president. Biden has rejected the claim as false and “ridiculous.”
Gabbard's accusation that Obama conspired to subvert Trump's 2016 elections through manufacturing intelligence on Russia's interference contradicts a review of the CIA ordered by director John Ratcliffe and published on July 2, a 2018 Bipartisan Senate report and declassified documents that Gabbard was published last week.
The documents show that Gabbard combined two separate findings of intelligence from the United States by claiming that Obama and his national security assistants changed an evaluation that Russia was probably not trying to influence the elections through cyber media.
A find was that Russia was not trying to hack the electoral infrastructure of the United States to change votes, and the second was that Moscow was probably using cybernetic means to influence the political environment of the United States through the information and propaganda operations, including the theft and escape of data from the servers of the Democratic party.
The American intelligence evaluation of January 2017 ordered by Obama was based on that second finding: that Russian President Vladimir Putin authorized influence operations to influence the 2016 vote to Trump.
The revision ordered by Ratcliffe found failures in the production of that evaluation. But he did not play his conclusion and confirmed “the quality and credibility” of a highly classified CIA report on which the authors of the evaluation were based.
