Pam Bondi orders grand jury probe of Obama administration review of 2016 election
National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard claimed at a White House news conference last month that top Obama administration officials carried out a "treasonous conspiracy" against Donald Trump. Gabbard said she was sending criminal referrals to the Justice Department.
A former senior Justice Department official condemned the move as "a dangerous political stunt." And a former senior national security official pointed out that multiple past reviews, including ones conducted by Republicans, found no such crimes.
"There's no logical, rational basis for this," said the official, who asked not to be named.
The senior Trump administration official said that there is no exact timetable for when the grand jury will meet and that it could take months for the proceeding to begin. Fox News first reported Bondi's letter.
The official said a letter signed by Bondi instructs an unnamed federal prosecutor to begin presenting evidence to a grand jury to secure potential federal indictments. But the letter does not say what the charges would be, whom the grand jury will investigate or where it will meet.
A Justice Department spokesperson declined to comment.
Democratic lawmakers have accused the administration of seeking to distract attention from the Jeffrey Epstein case. Conservative media and influencers have criticized how Trump, Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel have handled the case and demanded the release of more documents. Democrats contend that Gabbard's talk of a treasonous Obama-era plot is patently false and a diversion.
A 2020 bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee review contradicted the idea that there was a conspiracy by Obama administration officials against Trump, finding significant evidence of Russian interference in the 2016 election. Then-Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., the acting chair of the committee at the time, signed off on the report.
The committee found no evidence of "collusion" between the Trump campaign and Russia, Rubio said in a statement at the time. But he added: "What the Committee did find however is very troubling. We found irrefutable evidence of Russian meddling."
The plans for a grand jury investigation are the latest in a series of actions by the Trump administration apparently designed to rewrite the history of the 2016 election. Democrats say Trump is improperly using the levers of government to seek retribution against his political rivals and exercise sweeping powers.
Trump and his supporters have long claimed that intelligence and law enforcement officials sought to undermine his first term by overstating Russia's interference in the 2016 election and investigating Trump's aides for potential collusion with Moscow.
They have accused former FBI Director James Comey and former CIA Director John Brennan of using the probes to damage Trump.
A lawyer for Comey did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Comey and Brennan, who is a paid contributor to NBC News and MSNBC, have denied wrongdoing.
The intelligence community's analysis of the 2016 election and subsequent government investigations failed to satisfy the far-right and far-left sides of the American political divide.
A probe by special counsel Robert Mueller found that Russia intervened in 2016 to undercut Hillary Clinton. But it did not find evidence that the Trump team colluded with the Kremlin, as some voices on the left had suggested.
At the same time, the special counsel Trump appointed in his first term, John Durham, disappointed far-right activists with his three-year investigation.
Durham found no criminal conspiracy among Obama administration officials to fabricate intelligence about Russia's actions in 2016. He also filed no charges against the intelligence officers who oversaw a 2017 assessment that found Russia had tried to skew the election outcome in Trump's favor.
But Trump, as president and candidate, has depicted former President Barack Obama and other former administration officials in prison garb and called for their imprisonments. Last month, he posted an artificial intelligence video of himself smiling as a fake depiction of Obama is arrested by FBI agents in the Oval Office and taken to jail.
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