Newly declassified documents suggest senior Obama administration officials, and possibly former President Barack Obama himself, manipulated intelligence findings to support the discredited narrative that President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign welcomed the backing of the Russian government.
The records pointing to deception by the Obama administration, released by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard on Friday, allege the Obama White House played a direct role in steering the intelligence community toward conclusions that exaggerated Russian election interference during the 2016 race. The disclosures have triggered renewed scrutiny of the origins of the “Russiagate” investigation and raise fresh questions about the key players who appear to have misled the public to undermine Trump and aid former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
“Their goal was to usurp President Trump and subvert the will of the American people,” Gabbard posted to X on Friday, when she announced a criminal referral to the Department of Justice. “No matter how powerful, every person involved in this conspiracy must be investigated and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. The integrity of our democratic republic depends on it. We are turning over all documents to the DOJ for criminal referral.”
According to Gabbard, the declassified materials suggest that high-level decisions Obama administration officials made in early December 2016, including a directive to suppress an intelligence document that said Russia did not hack election infrastructure and instead fast-track a new assessment, were designed to recast pre-election intelligence into a post-election political weapon.
Since her announcement, the Justice Department has reportedly received the criminal referral, though neither agency disclosed the names of specific people who could be charged. However, the FBI is investigating former CIA director John Brennan and former FBI Director James Comey over allegations that they misused intelligence and made false statements to Congress related to the 2016 election and their investigation of then-candidate Trump.
Additionally, new revelations about the scope of the Trump administration’s investigation came Monday when investigative journalist Matt Taibbi told Fox News’s America’s Newsroom that the materials subject to DOJ review make “clear that the investigation is now aimed at the Obama White House and, in particular, at Barack Obama.”
No charges have been filed against Comey and Brennan, though Trump posted an image to Truth Social over the weekend that included the key figures he called the “shady bunch” in photoshopped orange jumpsuits alongside Obama, former United Nations Ambassador Susan Rice, former DNI James Clapper, and several other high-ranking Obama administration officials, fueling speculation about whether this administration would pursue charges over what Trump has for years insisted was a weaponization of government against him.
“The Shady Bunch”
Trump is going off. pic.twitter.com/bMe2AHVHUH
— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) July 21, 2025
The expanded list of former officials of interest, as well as the increased scrutiny of the intelligence community’s role, marks a dramatic shift in focus after the yearslong post-2016 special counsel investigation into how the Russian collusion investigation began.
Past inquiries, including what led to Special Counsel John Durham’s 2023 report, have zeroed in on misconduct within the FBI and DOJ. But Gabbard’s disclosures broaden the aperture, pointing to alleged misconduct by the heads of the intelligence community agencies as the FBI under Comey was opening the investigation into Trump, which came to be known as Crossfire Hurricane in July 2016.
Seeds of the scandal
The intelligence community’s efforts to amplify claims of Russian election interference coincided with mounting political pressure to delegitimize Trump’s November 2016 victory. On Dec. 7, 2016, then-Clapper told the Obama White House that “foreign adversaries did not use cyberattacks on election infrastructure to alter the U.S. Presidential election outcome.” Despite this assessment, Obama’s national security team decided to create a new intelligence community assessment, which it ultimately completed on Jan. 6, 2017, that would include aggressive claims about Russian interference and Russia’s intent to help Trump.
In addition to Gabbard’s revelations, a July 2 declassified “lessons-learned” review commissioned by CIA Director John Ratcliffe cast further doubt on the 2016 ICA. Ratcliffe’s memo described the rushed and politicized process that led to the assessment’s conclusions. The review found that senior Obama officials compressed the timeline for completing the report, sidelined customary interagency checks, and relied on unverified intelligence in drawing the most explosive conclusions — namely, the assertion that Russian President Vladimir Putin had directly interfered to help Trump win.
That assertion went on to underpin years of partisan Democratic talking points about Trump and Russia, even though the CIA said in the lessons-learned review that it was not supported by strong evidence and was the result of pressure from Obama’s top officials.
According to that review, agency leaders “elevated unsubstantiated claims to the status of credible supporting evidence, compromising the analytical integrity of the judgment,” which broke from established standards. The CIA review criticized the over-reliance on a single source, widely believed to be linked to the debunked Steele dossier, and faulted then-CIA director Brennan and others for pushing the Trump-Russia narrative over the objections of career analysts.
“In an email to Brennan on 30 December, [two senior leaders of the CIA] stated the judgment should be removed because it was both weakly supported and unnecessary, given the strength and logic of the paper’s other findings on intent. They warned that including it would only ‘open up a line of very politicized inquiry,’” according to the July 2 CIA review.
The review ultimately found that the agency heads’ decision to include the Steele dossier, commissioned by the Clinton campaign and authored by ex-British intelligence officer Christopher Steele, “ran counter to fundamental tradecraft principles and ultimately undermined the credibility of a key judgment.”
The Clinton annex brings in more smoke
A recently declassified annex to a 2018 inspector general report revealed that the FBI failed to investigate fully several thumb drives containing hacked State Department data, including messages linked to Obama, during its 2016 investigation into Clinton’s use of a private email server. Clinton was ultimately exonerated under Comey’s watch, and Comey began investigating Trump shortly after.
The annex introduced additional evidence that senior FBI officials at the time were making partisan decisions, particularly because some of the same agents who decided not to dig too deeply into the Clinton email materials went on to bend the rules in an aggressive pursuit of Trump just months later.
One key theory investigators may pursue is whether Brennan altered or backdated his own handwritten notes describing an Aug. 3, 2016, White House meeting where he purportedly briefed Obama, then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch, and Comey on what became known as the “Clinton Plan intelligence.” This intelligence, originally sourced from a Dutch spy agency that had penetrated Russian systems, revealed that Moscow was aware the Clinton campaign had concocted a plan to link Trump falsely to Russia as a diversion from her private email scandal.
Notably, the Clinton Plan intelligence was never included in any pre-election or post-election briefings to Congress, and it was omitted from the January 2017 intelligence community assessment, despite reportedly being the only verified piece of Russian intelligence the U.S. obtained during the period. According to Durham’s findings, Brennan received this material directly but did not ensure its transmission to the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane team. Had the FBI’s leaders not ignored credible claims that the Clinton campaign planned to invent the Russia scandal, agents may have reconsidered some of their aggressive investigative steps or abandoned the Russian collusion investigation altogether, Durham concluded.
Simultaneously, the CIA buried the most credible intelligence contradicting the collusion narrative. A referral memo dated Sept. 7, 2016, sent from the CIA to top FBI officials Peter Strzok and Comey, urged an investigation into the Clinton Plan intelligence — but no action was ever taken, and some rank-and-file agents on the Crossfire Hurricane team later testified they had never seen or heard of the memo. One senior FBI agent reportedly became “visibly upset and emotional” when shown the document by Durham years later, feeling “betrayed” by the omission.
Can anyone be held accountable?
While the political scandal is once again front and center, the road to a possible prosecution is far less clear. Trump allies argue that the people involved in fabricating the collusion narrative should face criminal consequences, including perjury or conspiracy charges, despite the difficulty prosecutors would face in bringing charges related to the start of the Russia investigation due to the five-year statute of limitations, which long ago passed.
Mike Davis, founder of the conservative Article III Project, told the Washington Examiner that if any charges are brought, they will likely have to be conspiracy charges due to complications arising from the statute of limitations. Davis predicted that if a case is brought, it would likely be a “conspiracy against rights” case, and he said he would “not rule out anyone in the Obama-era White House,” including the former president himself.
Other legal experts, including former federal prosecutor Neama Rahmani, have suggested the DOJ could seek to look into whether Brennan committed perjury under questioning from congressional committees about the drafting of the 2016 intelligence assessment.
“If the comments were [false], maybe you get perjury. If not, maybe a Section 1001 false statement — or stretch it into a continuing conspiracy. But it’s weak,” Rahmani admitted.
Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton told the Washington Examiner that investigators should consider whether recent testimony by former officials was part of a broader cover-up. “You could have a conspiracy without perjury as well,” Fitton said. “But if the perjury was part of a scheme, and the scheme never ended, the statute of limitations might be extended.”
But depending on how the case is constructed, investigators could still be within range. Brennan was interviewed by Durham on Aug. 21, 2020. If the statute of limitations is five years, that leaves until late August of this year for a straightforward charge tied to Brennan’s interview with Durham. A conspiracy case, however, could extend the timeline much further, creating a consequential deadline for Trump’s new FBI Director Kash Patel as he faces the countdown clock.
An outside investigation may be needed to obtain full public trust
Fitton warned that the Justice Department, despite being led by a Trump ally in Attorney General Pam Bondi, might be ill-equipped to police itself and said an outside investigation may be the only way to secure accountability.
“The first challenge for the Justice Department and the FBI is how they’re going to investigate themselves,” he said. “This is why I think there should be an independent investigation outside the Justice Department and FBI directed by the president or his appointee.”
He also pointed out that the targeting of Trump was intertwined with efforts to shield Clinton. “They had serious intelligence information that there was a conspiracy to obstruct justice in the Justice Department and the FBI, involving the Democratic National Committee, the attorney general — and it wasn’t pursued in any aggressive way,” Fitton said. “Simultaneously, they were targeting Trump with unprecedented spying.”
Additional political optics and hurdles loom
Still, Trump’s team faces a political challenge: convincing the public that these revelations, nearly a decade later, should alter their perspective on the Russiagate narrative.
According to Andrew McCarthy, a former prosecutor, the Trump administration would be wise not to suggest that “Russiagate was a total hoax, a complete fabrication by Democrats,” because “Russia habitually tries to influence American politics, including electoral politics, just as our government has for decades intruded in the politics of the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia.”
In essence, the Trump administration’s current stance “invites correction” and “thereby turns into a matter of consequence, something that was utterly inconsequential.”
Strategically, the timing of Gabbard’s release is also raising eyebrows.
It came just days after a political firestorm surrounding the DOJ’s handling of long-promised documents related to the late, disgraced sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, which has mushroomed into a political scandal for the Trump administration that led to the president’s demand on Thursday to unseal grand jury records in the case.
Before making that demand, however, Trump had become frustrated with media questions about Epstein, accusing his supporters of being influenced by a Democratic-backed “hoax” on the same level as the Russia-Trump collusion conspiracy.
The current political optics — that is, a Republican administration investigating a Democratic administration from two terms ago — may also play into Democratic arguments that Trump is weaponizing government power to settle old scores. But Trump administration officials maintain they are simply exposing a long-buried abuse of intelligence power.
“This is not a Democrat or Republican issue. This is an issue that is so serious it should concern every single American because it has to do with the integrity of our democratic republic,” Gabbard told Fox News’s Maria Bartiromo Sunday.
FBI IGNORED KEY EVIDENCE IN CLINTON EMAIL INVESTIGATION, DOJ WATCHDOG REVEALS
Fitton said he believes there is still a way for the DOJ to thread the needle and secure charges against Obama-era officials due to the vast web of evidence released since the Russiagate conspiracy began to show cracks in 2018.
“There’s been plenty of evidence to initiate the broad investigation even prior to the release of this material,” Fitton said. “It just keeps building.”