Barack Obama Isn’t Going to Jail

Key Points and Summary – The Trump administration, led by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, has launched a new offensive against Barack Obama, alleging a “treasonous conspiracy” to subvert the 2016 election and sending a criminal referral to the DOJ. However, critics are calling the move a “nothingburger” and a dangerous attempt to rewrite history.

-The core of Gabbard’s claim rests on a “bait-and-switch,” conflating Russian hacking of DNC emails—which is widely acknowledged to have happened—with the baseless accusation that the Obama administration fabricated a story about Russia altering vote totals, something it never actually claimed.

No, Barack Obama is not in legal jeopardy over Russia

It’s not clear if it’s meant as a distraction from bad headlines about Jeffrey Epstein, his longtime antipathy towards Barack Obama, or his continuing anger over “the Russia story” consuming large chunks of his first term as president.

However, Donald Trump’s administration has, in recent days, made a concerted effort to spread the notion that Barack Obama faces potential legal trouble.

And this was even before Trump posted a fake AI video of Obama being arrested. The video was scored, for some reason, with Trump’s favorite disco anthem, The Village People’s “YMCA.”

The idea came from a report, issued by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, titled “New Evidence of Obama Administration Conspiracy to Subvert President Trump’s 2016 Victory and Presidency.”

Gabbard described the revelations as “overwhelming evidence that demonstrates how, after President Trump won the 2016 election against Hillary Clinton, President Obama and his national security cabinet members manufactured and politicized intelligence to lay the groundwork for what was essentially a years-long coup against President Trump.”

A Criminal Referral 

After that, as reported by Fox News, Gabbard sent a criminal referral to the Department of Justice, which has received it.

“Their goal was to usurp President Trump and subvert the will of the American people,” Gabbard said on X about the referral. “No matter how powerful, every person involved in this conspiracy must be investigated and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. The integrity of our democratic republic depends on it. We are turning over all documents to the DOJ for criminal referral.”

In a separate post, Gabbard referred to the intelligence as exposing “a treasonous conspiracy by officials at the highest levels of the Obama White House to subvert the will of the American people and try to usurp the President from fulfilling his mandate.”

Gabbard, ironically, was a Democratic member of Congress and a nominal ally of President Obama at the time of these events.

However, the narrative pushed by Gabbard and the Trump Administration has several significant holes in it.

“Smoke and Mirrors” 

In a piece this week for The Bulwark, Cathy Young argues that Gabbard’s accusations amount to “smoke and mirrors.”

“Yet even a cursory look at the actual substance of Gabbard’s dramatic claims shows … a nothingburger. There is no actual substance. Instead, there is blatant sleight of hand and manipulation of evidence, debunking a theory of Russian election interference that the Obama administration never endorsed,” Young writes.

The key to Gabbard’s “sleight of hand,” Young writes, is that the Obama Administration never claimed that Russia successfully manipulated vote totals.

“This supposed scandal rests on a crude bait-and-switch. A quick look at the media reports Gabbard cites shows that they weren’t talking about altering the election outcome through ‘cyberattacks on election infrastructure’—that is, actual tampering with the vote count,” she writes. “Rather, the claims of election interference via cyber warfare concerned, as the Washington Post put it, ‘individuals with connections to the Russian government who provided WikiLeaks with thousands of hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee and others, including Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman.’”

Those things, pretty uncontroversially, actually happened. Obama, James Comey, and others didn’t make them up. That was the conclusion, in 2020, of the then-Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee.

“The Senate Intelligence Committee conducted a bipartisan investigation reviewing hundreds of thousands of documents and interviewing witnesses over several years. The unanimous, bipartisan conclusion was that Russia interfered in the 2016 election to benefit Donald Trump,” Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the committee, said in a statement this week, per CNN. “This is just another example of the DNI trying to cook the books, rewrite history, and erode trust in the intelligence agencies she’s supposed to be leading.”

Obama’s Crime? 

At any rate, it’s hard to imagine what, if any crime, Barack Obama might have committed, even if everything Gabbard alleges were true. And if they were, it would appear likely that the 2024 ruling on “presidential immunity” would rule out any type of criminal prosecution for “official acts.”

About the Author: 

Stephen Silver is an award-winning journalist, essayist, and film critic, and contributor to the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Broad Street Review, and Splice Today. The co-founder of the Philadelphia Film Critics Circle, Stephen lives in suburban Philadelphia with his wife and two sons. For over a decade, Stephen has authored thousands of articles that focus on politics, national security, technology, and the economy. Follow him on X (formerly Twitter) at @StephenSilver, and subscribe to his Substack newsletter.