Barack Obama has broken his silence on calls from Donald Trump for him to be prosecuted by unequivocally rejecting his successor’s accusations that he tried to engineer a “coup” following Trump’s 2016 election victory by “manufacturing” evidence of Russian interference.
Obama’s office took the unusual step of issuing an emphatic refutation after Trump told reporters that his predecessor had “[tried] to lead a coup” against him and was guilty of “treason” over intelligence assessments suggesting that Russia had intervened to help Trump defeat Hillary Clinton in the campaign.
“Out of respect for the office of the presidency, our office does not normally dignify the constant nonsense and misinformation flowing out of this White House with a response,” the statement said. “But these claims are outrageous enough to merit one. These bizarre allegations are ridiculous and a weak attempt at distraction.”
The statement went on to criticize claims made in an 11-page document released last week by Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, who said she was passing evidence of what she claimed was a “treasonous conspiracy” among Obama national security officials to the justice department, recommending their prosecution.
“Nothing in the document issued last week undercuts the widely accepted conclusion that Russia worked to influence the 2016 presidential election but did not successfully manipulate any votes,” it said.
“These findings were affirmed in a 2020 report by the bipartisan senate Intelligence Committee, led by then-Chairman Marco Rubio.”
Obama’s response followed a fusillade of accusations by Trump in the White House as he was meeting the president of the Philippines, Ferdinand Marcos Jr, the son of the country’s former autocratic president, who was ousted in a popular “people’s power revolution” in 1986.
Asked by a reporter who should be the main target of the criminal investigation recommended in Gabbard’s report, Trump said: “Based on what I read, and I read pretty much what you read, it would be President Obama. He started it, and Biden was there with him. And [James] Comey [the former FBI director] was there, and [James] Clapper [the former director of national intelligence], the whole group was there.
“It was them, too, but the leader of the gang was President Obama, Barack Hussein Obama. Have you heard of him?”
He went on: “This isn’t like evidence. This is like proof, irrefutable proof that Obama was sedatious [sic], that Obama … was trying to lead a coup, and it was with Hillary Clinton, with all these other people, but Obama headed it up.
“He’s guilty. This was treason. This was every word you can think of. They tried to steal the election. They tried to obfuscate the election. They did things that nobody’s ever even imagined.”
Trump said Gabbard had told him she had “thousands of additional documents coming”.
“It’s the most unbelievable thing I think I’ve ever read. So you want to take a look at that and stop talking about nonsense,” he said, in what appeared to be a coded appeal for supporters to drop their demands for the release of documents related to Jeffrey Epstein, the disgraced financier who was found dead in his prison cell in 2019 as he awaited trial on sex-trafficking charges.
But the Gabbard report, which accused the Obama administration of forcing spy agencies to alter their conclusions, conflated and misrepresented different issues to discredit the intelligence community’s assessment in 2017 that Russia sought to simultaneously help Trump and damage Clinton.
The assessment concluded that Russia did not engage in cyber-attacks against election infrastructure to change vote tallies, but found Moscow hacked and leaked documents from the Democratic National Committee to damage the Clinton campaign.
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The Gabbard report used that first conclusion to suggest that a broader Russian influence operation did not occur, and cited Obama’s presidential daily brief in December 2016 that concluded there were no Russian hacks of election systems being pushed back as evidence of political interference in the assessment.
Assertions of Russian interference were subsequently borne out in the report published by the special counsel Robert Mueller, in 2019, and the bipartisan Senate intelligence committee report published the following year, led by Rubio, now secretary of state in Trump’s administration.
A former CIA analyst and national intelligence officer, Fulton Armstrong, told the Guardian in an email that Gabbard’s paper “was obviously written with a pre-ordained conclusion”.
“Even a quick read shows how the confusion between confidence and probability [over intelligence assessments] – even if not deliberate – leads to sloppiness and manipulation,” Armstrong said.
“The bigger problem is that Tulsi’s paper is such shit. Her reference to ‘deep state officials’ is amateurish, silly, and undercuts the whole damned document.
“She’s clever to use crappy precedents and confusion to make her case, but an issue like Russian manipulation of US elections, with so many analysts from diverse organizational cultures, is almost certainly going to leave enough offal on the floor that anyone who wanted to make a one-sided political slam job can find enough to fill an 11-page paper.”
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