The president is engulfed in a Jeffrey Epstein controversy of his top law-enforcement officials’ own making. Knowing the president had a yearslong friendship with Epstein, Attorney General Pam Bondi — egged on by demagogic commentary from MAGA influencers Kash Patel and Dan Bongino before Donald Trump named them to lead the FBI — nonetheless fed the notion of a broad sex-trafficking conspiracy implicating famous Epstein “clients.” Predictably unable to back up this irresponsible suggestion with evidence, Trump officials are now stunned that the president’s base won’t take “never mind” for an answer and that Democrats are reveling in the equally flimsy suggestion of an administration cover-up of the full extent of Trump’s relationship to Epstein.
Stuck in this mire, the administration is trying to change the subject. Trump and his national intelligence director, Tulsi Gabbard, are claiming that former President Barack Obama led a “treasonous” conspiracy by promoting the fiction that Trump worked with Russia to steal the 2016 election.
The underlying truth is serious enough: Trump was the victim of one of the most insidious dirty tricks in American political history. The Clinton campaign used the bogus “Steele dossier” to manufacture the Trump-Russia “collusion” narrative. Obama administration officials picked up this story and ran with it.
By July 2016, President Obama knew — because then-CIA Director John Brennan briefed him — that the Clinton campaign had a campaign strategy to divert attention from her email scandal by “vilifying” Trump by tying him to Russia.
Following Trump’s stunning victory, Obama directed his intelligence officials to hurriedly compose and publish an intelligence community assessment (ICA) to highlight Russian interference in the election. Obama and Vice President Biden met with top national-security officials on January 5, 2017 — the day before they briefed the incoming Trump. The meeting covered Russian interference in the election, contacts between Trump transition official Michael Flynn and Russia’s ambassador to the United States, and the Obama administration’s withholding from the Trump transition team of intelligence about Russia.
In the last minutes of the Obama administration, then-National Security Adviser Susan Rice wrote a memo to the file, discussing the January 5 White House meeting led by Obama. Patently, the memo minimized Obama’s role, shifting primary responsibility for the probe to FBI Director James Comey.
All of the above has been well known for eight years; even though Gabbard presents it as a shocking revelation, there is nothing new about Obama’s connection to the Trump-Russia collusion farce.
But Trump and Gabbard go further, treating the accurate portion of the Democratic narrative as though it too were a fiction. Russia did indeed try, however ineffectively, to interfere in the election. Trump CIA Director John Ratcliffe has attested to it. Just days before Gabbard’s release of emails, the CIA issued a report finding that the 2016 ICA had been on solid footing when it concluded “with high confidence” that Russia had meddled in the hope of undermining Clinton as president.
Gabbard nevertheless seeks to discredit the conclusion of Russian meddling by pointing to 2016 emails from Obama DNI James Clapper to the effect that the Russians did not conduct cyberattacks. But Clapper was referring to Russian cyber operations against election infrastructure. Russia probed that infrastructure for weaknesses but did not ultimately engage in any operation that undermined vote-counting. The ICA was focused on something else: Russian cyber operations along the lines of hacking the DNC and churning out anti-Clinton campaign messaging.
Russia engaged in that latter kind of interference in 2016, as it has habitually meddled in American politics for decades. There was never, however, any evidence of Trump complicity in this interference.
The Mueller investigation, which Trump trumpets for its conclusion that he did not conspire with the Kremlin, also concluded that Russia meddled in the election, and prosecutors filed two indictments to that effect (although they knew, of course, that they would never have to prove those cases in court). U.S. intelligence agencies also conclude that Russia meddled, as did the Senate Intelligence Committee, in an investigation led by then-Chairman Marco Rubio (R., Fla.), now Trump’s secretary of state.
The faux suspicions of Trump-Russia collusion were thus tucked neatly into an overarching probe of Russian cyberespionage against the United States. The Obama administration had not only the authority but the obligation to investigate that. Exploiting it to taint Trump was an appalling abuse of power.
Those who would argue that this abuse of power constitutes a crime should remember that Trump and his team have avidly proclaimed that presidents must have immunity from criminal prosecution for acts within the broad ambit of executive power.
Special counsel John Durham, who was tapped by the Trump I DOJ to investigate the origins of the Trump-Russia collusion narrative, spent four exhaustive years on the probe. As his 306-page report concludes, the Clinton campaign was principally responsible for fabricating the story, and the FBI was recklessly irresponsible in opening a full investigation and using the dossier in court without rudimentary verification steps. But he drew the correct conclusion that “even horribly bad judgment” and “unseemly or unethical conduct” are not crimes absent violation of a particular criminal statute.
That is still true. It should be front of mind when partisans assess the official conduct of their political rivals. We have had enough, more than enough, lawfare. And before concluding that turnabout is fair play, Trump should consider that lawfare can also backfire — which helps explain why he is back in the White House in the first place.