The Week: Trump Brings Back Russiagate

• In honor of Stephen Colbert’s firing, we too will refrain from making jokes.

• Trying to turn the page from all things Jeffrey Epstein, President Trump has revived Russiagate. He accuses Barack Obama of “treason” for promoting the hoax that Trump colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 election. To fan the flames, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has declassified scads of 2016 intelligence emails. She claims they show that Obama DNI James Clapper and other intelligence officials knew the Kremlin had not interfered in the election, yet Obama had them rush out an intelligence-community assessment (ICA) claiming that it had. It’s sleight of hand: Clapper was talking about Russian espionage against election infrastructure (e.g., voting machines, registration rolls) — and what he said was that Russian intel hadn’t succeeded in undermining vote-counting, not that its operatives had refrained from probing for weaknesses. The ICA, by contrast, focused on Russian cyber ops in the nature of hacking the DNC emails and publishing online anti-Clinton campaign messaging. Even Trump’s CIA — in a report issued just days before Gabbard’s email dump — found that the ICA had been correct in expressing “high confidence” that Russia meddled in the election to denigrate Hillary Clinton. The Democrats’ dirty trick was the contention that Trump had conspired with Putin — a fabrication of the Clinton campaign, largely based on the bogus Steele dossier. Obama was well aware of Clinton’s ploy, which his DOJ and FBI disgracefully used to obtain warrants from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to monitor Trump’s campaign. He pushed out the ICA while he was still president, knowing it would feed the Trump-Russia collusion frenzy. But such abuses of power are not crimes — as no one should know better than Trump, who spent 2024 convincing the Supreme Court that presidents are immune from criminal prosecution for their official acts.

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Jeffrey Epstein

• In honor of Stephen Colbert’s firing, we too will refrain from making jokes.

• Trying to turn the page from all things Jeffrey Epstein, President Trump has revived Russiagate. He accuses Barack Obama of “treason” for promoting the hoax that Trump colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 election. To fan the flames, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has declassified scads of 2016 intelligence emails. She claims they show that Obama DNI James Clapper and other intelligence officials knew the Kremlin had not interfered in the election, yet Obama had them rush out an intelligence-community assessment (ICA) claiming that it had. It’s sleight of hand: Clapper was talking about Russian espionage against election infrastructure (e.g., voting machines, registration rolls) — and what he said was that Russian intel hadn’t succeeded in undermining vote-counting, not that its operatives had refrained from probing for weaknesses. The ICA, by contrast, focused on Russian cyber ops in the nature of hacking the DNC emails and publishing online anti-Clinton campaign messaging. Even Trump’s CIA — in a report issued just days before Gabbard’s email dump — found that the ICA had been correct in expressing “high confidence” that Russia meddled in the election to denigrate Hillary Clinton. The Democrats’ dirty trick was the contention that Trump had conspired with Putin — a fabrication of the Clinton campaign, largely based on the bogus Steele dossier. Obama was well aware of Clinton’s ploy, which his DOJ and FBI disgracefully used to obtain warrants from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to monitor Trump’s campaign. He pushed out the ICA while he was still president, knowing it would feed the Trump-Russia collusion frenzy. But such abuses of power are not crimes — as no one should know better than Trump, who spent 2024 convincing the Supreme Court that presidents are immune from criminal prosecution for their official acts.