Russiagate is one of the most significant scandals in American history, and it totally shatters the media-manufactured myth of Barack Obama.
Newly released details by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard about the Trump-Russia collusion scandal paint a picture of an Obama administration that used official power to tarnish and destroy a political opponent.
My colleague Virginia Allen had an excellent write-up on the Wednesday release from the House Intelligence Committee report, which, according to Gabbard, “exposes how the Obama administration manufactured the January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment that they knew was false, promoting the LIE that Vladimir Putin and the Russian government helped President [Donald] Trump win the 2016 election.”
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Gabbard doubled down Wednesday, saying that Obama’s national security team “knew it would promote this contrived narrative that Russia interfered in the 2016 election to help President Trump win, selling it to the American people as though it were true. It wasn’t.”
As details of the Russia collusion hoax drip out from the White House, the whole thing keeps looking worse for the Obama administration.
The origin of the Russia collusion narrative, which was a constant source of media coverage through Trump’s first term, began without any credible evidence. But top officials in the Obama White House used their final days in office to create the implication that Russia was backing Trump. This, despite the intelligence community telling them that they had no evidence connecting Russia to Trump.
In fact, according to the files, it’s not clear at all that Russia even wanted Trump to win. That conclusion, according to the report, was based on a “scant, unclear, and unverifiable fragment,” from a single source.
After Gabbard’s report simmered for a while, Obama issued this very Obama-esque statement.
“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.”
As usual, the holier-than-thou former president said nothing in particular while pretending, as always, that he’s above the petty workings and accusations of mere mortals.
But Obama can’t just eject from this scandal.
If the report is true, then it suggests that the Obama administration, at the very highest level, attempted to weaponize the intelligence community, the deep state, to create a narrative about Trump and Russia that was meant to damage and delegitimize Trump’s presidency.
That’s a massive betrayal of public trust and makes Watergate seem like a nothingburger.
Obama was a change agent focused on changing institutions to serve his political movement. On this end, he achieved a remarkable amount of success but ultimately sowed the seeds for a total collapse in American institutional trust.
For the constant talk about how Trump breaks “norms,” it was the Obama administration that destroyed the notion of an amicable transfer of power between presidential administrations.
This may be hard to come to grips with for some people who still buy into the notion of a “moderate” Obama who was above petty politics and the partisan fray, but the actions of his administration were ruthlessly partisan.
Obama effectively wedded the power of the federal government to the Democrat political machine. His political movement co-opted the private sector and corporate America, too — once the bogeymen of the Left — into the larger project. The regime was set to carry out the Left’s objectives no matter who sat in the Oval Office.
In 2016, what Obama once called the bitter clingers — the “basket of deplorables,” as Democrat presidential candidate Hillary Clinton even more obnoxiously called them — struck back and elected Trump. But the Obama machine wouldn’t let this stand. So instead of gracefully accepting defeat, they weaponized the bureaucratic leviathan Obama built to stonewall and damage Trump at every turn.
With the narrow election of President Joe Biden, it seemed the strategy worked. That Biden was a barely there empty suit may have even been a positive for the collection of Obama advisers and deep state bureaucrats who clearly ran the executive branch as the “president” snoozed and ate ice cream.
They set the precedent for using official power to destroy enemies of the regime. And they had a vast bureaucratic apparatus that was eager to help them do it. So when the Biden administration worked with leftist prosecutors to jail Trump, it was done in the spirit of the Russia collusion hoax.
And that’s the line that runs through the Obama-Biden joint apparatus that created and linked two of the biggest scandals in American political history. The first was the Obama administration’s weaponization of the deep state; the second was the deep state presidency where Biden operated as little more than a figurehead.
The return of Trump to the White House is the ultimate rebuke of the institutions that Obama’s minions corrupted.
If Gabbard’s report is true, it should forever put to rest the notion of the “scandal-free” Obama administration.
Obama entered office promising “hope and change,” but he left us with malaise and cynicism.
Originally published at The Daily Signal.
Jarrett Stepman is a contributor to The Daily Signal and co-host of The Right Side of History podcast. He is also the author of the book The War on History: The Conspiracy to Rewrite America’s Past.
