Gabbard’s Dramatics Entice Trump to “Go After” Obama for “Treason”

Still, nine years later, Donald Trump is so in the grip of his malignant narcissism that he must somehow disprove – however falsely – that he won the 2016 election without any assist from Russian meddling. He simply cannot stand any implication that Russia might have helped.

So he has charged his intelligence appointees to show that the “Russia collusion hoax” was rooted in the conspiracy of a cabal at the top of government that election year.

He has had CIA Director John Ratcliffe order up a “CIA Note”, a short and redundant document that finds multiple faults with the CIA’s prior review in early 2017 of Russia involvement. Ratcliffe followed this up by delivering criminal referrals to the Justice Department on July 8 that the former directors of the CIA and FBI, John Brennan and James Comey, be investigated for illegal conduct such as lying to Congress.

Tulsi Gabbard and her treasonous Obama.

And second, just a couple of weeks later, Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Tulsi Gabbard did her part to win Trump’s praise with her study of intelligence communications in late 2016 which, she alleges, show the corrupt intent of bringing down the newly-elected president, Donald Trump.

Gabbard upped the ante. It’s not just Brennan and Comey. She is going after Obama. She claims documents show Obama rejected the intelligence community view that Russia was not trying to “hack the election in favor of either candidate” and called a December 6th National Security Council meeting on “a sensitive matter” in which he charged DNI James Clapper to produce “an intelligence assessment that detailed not if but how Moscow affected the outcome of the election”, Gabbard writes. She is saying Obama ordered intel to slant its view to say – well, she doesn’t quite say what she thinks Obama ordered if he ordered anything. She has not identified specific criminal activity. Which doesn't keep her from saying:

”There must be indictments, those responsible, no matter how powerful they are and were at that time, no matter who was involved in creating this treasonous conspiracy against the American people. They all must be held accountable.”

No sooner said than done. Attorney General Pam Bondi said her department “would be proud” to work with Gabbard and the Department of Justice announced on Wednesday the creation of a so-called strike force to investigate her allegations.

Gabbard seems to treat as a treasonous conspiracy the mere production of the "intelligence community assessment" (ICA) that was completed in January 2017. What Gabbard has discovered does not seem all that conspiratorial. It was no secret that Obama wanted a report on all that was known about any Russian interference in the election, and for it to be completed before Trump – a paranoiac on the subject and with unmistakable Russia leanings – took office when he would surely deep six any and all such intelligence. For Obama, knowing what Russia was up to was decidedly a national security matter.

It has long been universally concluded that Russia did interfere in the 2016 election. But even arch-conservative National Review says:

”All of the above has been well known for eight years; even though Gabbard presents it as a shocking revelation… 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.”

Donald Trump would have none of that. Sitting in the White House, he exulted:

"They caught president Obama absolutely cold. After what they did to me and, whether it's right or wrong, it's time to go after people. Obama's been caught directly, so people say, oh, you know, a group. It's not a group. It's Obama. His orders are on the paper. Barack Hussein Obama is the ringleader.

"Whether it's right or wrong, the man says. It's time to go after people. Retribution against everyone who has ever said anything critical of him. Obama, of course, is a special case. The Black president, whose candidacy he hd hoped to derail by claiming, solely out of the bigotry we see all through his life against Blacks, that he was born in Kenya and thus constitutionally ineligible to be president.

Without benefit of any evidence in Gabbard's claims that comes close, he would claim "treason", and with such confusion that it adds to our piece last week about his lapses of acuity:

"Look, he's guilty. It's not a question. I like to say 'Let's give it time'. It's there. 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, even in other countries."

Steal the election? Not what Gabbard claims, and what she does claim took place in December 2016, after the election.

Trump would go on to foul the presidency of the United States beyond anything imaginable of any other president in our history. He sent out an AI-created video that shows Trump and Obama sitting in the Oval Office when FBI agents enter, drag Obama out of his chair, force him to his knees before the White president, and remove him. The fake video then shows Obama in an orange jumpsuit in jail. The gay theme "YMCA" plays in the background.

This dangerously inspires assassination among the mentally deranged of his followers and he knows it. He has been called out before, as when he sent a tweet with him wielding a baseball bat over New York prosecutor Alvin Bragg's head. But the Supreme Court would call this an "official act", so he has immunity.

Apart from Ms. Gabbard’s deep-state conspiratorial theatrics, the issue boils down only to whether Russia favored Trump or was just trying to disrupt our democratic system.

Announcement of the “strike force” came hours after Gabbard released a previously classified report from 2017 and edited further since that questioned the intelligence community’s ICA. The report by Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee acknowledges that…

“Putin ordered conventional and cyber influence operations, notably by leaking politically sensitive emails obtained from computer intrusions”

… but argues that Putin’s putative interest in aiding Trump was flawed, based on reports characterized as “substandard”. One, the House panel said, was based on a single human source who was “biased” against both Trump and Putin, and who claimed that Putin was “counting” on Trump’s victory. “One scant, unclear and unverifiable fragment of a sentence from one of the substandard reports constitutes the only classified information cited to suggest Putin ‘aspired’ to help Trump win,” the report states.

The House committee that produced the report was led by California Representative Devin Nunes whose slavish devotion to Trump makes the report itself biased and suspect in Democrats’ eyes, witness that Nunes is now paid a colossal sum as the CEO of money-losing Trump Media & Technology Group, which is little more than Truth Social.

Democrats accused Gabbard of jeopardizing intelligence community sources and methods by releasing the Republican report.

In keeping with Trump's animosity toward the intelligence services, Gabbard seems out to sow doubt with inflammatory remarks that she will have a difficult time substantiating in court, should it come to that. She says, presumably about the 2017 ICA and her alleged perfidy of the plotters:

"The most egregious weaponization of intelligence in American history…The manufactured findings from shoddy sources, they suppressed evidence and credible intelligence that disproved their false claims. They disobeyed tradecraft, intelligence community standards, and withheld the truth from the America people.“

Gabbard recently tried to argue that there was no Russia influence because there was no Russian meddling in the actual vote totals, which has never been the intelligence community assessment.

Back to Ratcliffe

The "CIA Note" run up for Ratcliffe that reviews the 2017 ICA shows no awareness of the plot that Gabbard claims to have uncovered. It largely critiques the…

“highly compressed production timeline…which led to departures from standard practices in the drafting, coordination, and reviewing of the ICA.”>The most disputed point of the original review was its conclusion that Putin “aspired” to help Trump, a conclusion that “struggled to stand
James Comey and John Brennan.

on its own” and was given only a “moderate confidence level”. Also suspect was the “excessive involvement of agency heads” and mentions of John Brennan’s heavy hand. He pushed for assessing that Putin favored Trump in its U.S. election intrusions. He “risked stifling analytic debate” by “signaling that agency heads had already reached consensus before the ICA was even coordinated.” This was enough for Ratcliffe to make a criminal referral against Brennan. Why Comey as well isn't apparent. The Note makes no mention of him.

Former President Barack Obama unusually felt the need to speak out:

”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. But these claims are outrageous enough to merit one. These bizarre allegations are ridiculous and a weak attempt at distraction.

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. These findings were affirmed by the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee, led by then-Chairman Marco Rubio.”

The Senate Intelligence Committee said about the January 2017 ICA, “The Committee did not discover any significant analytic tradecraft issues in the preparation or final presentation of the ICA.”Special Counsel John Durham spent four years investigating the Russia connection and dwelled only on the Steele dossier, finding nothing to undermine the ICA.

The Department of Defense Inspector General saw no political bias or improper motivation in that specific ICA.

The Mueller team spent two years unearthing "numerous links between the Russian government and the Trump Campaign", reported in its 200 pages. The "investigation established that the Russian government perceived it would benefit from a Trump presidency and worked to secure that outcome, and that the Campaign expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts."

On the right, Fox News is all in for Gabbard. Primetime Laura Ingraham devoted a full segment with comments of this quality:

"When you think about the time, the man hours, the tens of millions of dollars, probably over a hundred million dollars when you add it all up, of the Mueller investigation. That entire thing was built on a lie…that entire thing was a fraud."

Media on the left call Trump's threats to "go after" Obama just another distraction by him to divert attention from the Jeffrey Epstein scandal. Trump has concocted the only story big enough to dislodge Epstein. Still, best not to discount Trump's insatiable appetite for revenge (in his confused mind he more than once in his campaign rally ramblings thought he was running against Obama).

Which brings us to Chief Justice John Roberts who wrote in his opinion that granted President Trump immunity from prosecution:

"Virtually every President is criticized for insufficiently enforcing some aspect of federal law…An enterprising prosecutor in a new administration may assert that a previous President violated that broad statute. Without immunity, such types of prosecutions of ex-Presidents could quickly become routine. The enfeebling of the Presidency and our Government that would result from such a cycle of factional strife is exactly what the Framers intended to avoid."

And here we have the president to whom he granted immunity doing just that. Had he not granted immunity to Trump, his slandering Obama as treasonous and putting his life at risk could have brought civil and/or criminal prosecution.

The Court has been so deferential to Trump that if Trump does pursue a criminal charge against Obama and it winds up in the Supreme Court, might the biased six say that immunity only applies to Trump and future presidents and cannot be applied ex post facto to Obama?