The recent release of documents on the Donald Trump-Russia hoax makes plainer than ever the damage former President Barack Obama has inflicted on our democracy.
Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard referred the matter to the Justice Department for possible criminal prosecutions because, she says, “there is irrefutable evidence that details how President Obama and his national security team directed the creation of an intelligence community assessment that they knew was false.”
John Brennan, then the director of the CIA, knowingly and aggressively used flimsy intelligence against Trump and hid exculpatory evidence to push a false narrative, first to try to defeat then-candidate Trump in 2016, and then to hog-tie him for four years once he had moved into the White House. It was a deliberate effort to thwart the will of citizens using malicious lies and to present this as a vital defense of democracy.
Although Brennan seems clearly to have been the most dastardly agent in the whole affair, Obama’s fingerprints are all over it as well. On Dec. 9, 2016, after Trump had won the election, the president ordered an intelligence assessment on how, not whether, Moscow influenced the election.
That very day, before any new assessment could even begin, the Obama administration began leaking stories to its media handmaidens, such as the New York Times and the Washington Post, which published major stories for which there was no evidence about President Vladimir Putin working with the intention of helping Trump.
From there, the collusion narrative took off. And because there was nothing solid to support it, Brennan knowingly used the concocted evidence in the Steele dossier. His underlings advised him not to do so, as it was evidently a malicious fairytale, but he went ahead anyway and spread its filth to bespatter Trump and his administration. The fiction was that Trump colluded with the tyrant in the Kremlin.
It was that Dec. 9 meeting, which included all Obama’s senior advisers, that changed the direction and sharply increased the darkness of the story Americans were told about the man they had chosen as their next president. That was the pivotal moment, after which Trump was hounded relentlessly and dishonestly by the Democratic establishment, including the legacy news media, the permanent bureaucracy, the intelligence community, the deep state, and whatever else you want to call it.
It may be that Obama did nothing more after first directing fearsome federal powers against Trump. If so, he will be protected by presidential immunity, for his request for a new, if biased, intelligence assessment was clearly an official act for which he cannot be prosecuted.
But that protection does not extend to those underlings who heard the Dec. 9 presidential order as the starting gun for the relentless pursuit of the legitimately elected president.
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Even if he will not face any legal consequences, Obama deserves to suffer reputational damage. He is supremely capable of presenting himself as a suave, sophisticated, and cerebral leader — an “articulate and bright and clean and nice-looking guy,” as former President Joe Biden once notoriously put it, but beneath the glossy carapace is a down-and-dirty knife fighter.
Others may end up getting punished for what they put the country through, as they should be. But Obama was the eminence who made it possible, and that should never be forgotten.