Targeting Obama, Trump's retribution campaign takes another turn
Advertisement
But on Tuesday, Trump reverted to earlier form, resurfacing — in a remarkably unfiltered and aggressive rant — his grievances against Obama, prominent figures in past administrations and others he associated with what he considers a long campaign of persecution dating back to the 2016 election.
Get Starting Point
A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday.
Enter Email
Sign Up
Seeking to change the topic at a time when he is under bipartisan political pressure over his unwillingness to do more to release investigative files into Jeffrey Epstein, he said the time had come for his opponents to face criminal charges.
President Trump on DNI report on 2016 Russian interference claims: "The leader of the gang was President Obama. Barack Hussein Obama, have you heard of him?...He's guilty. It's not a question. You know, I like to say let's give it time. It's there. He's guilty. This was treason."
— CSPAN (@cspan)
'I let her off the hook, and I'm very happy I did, but it's time to start after what they did to me,' Trump said of Hillary Clinton, adding: 'Whether it's right or wrong, it's time to go after people. Obama's been caught directly.'
Advertisement
'He's guilty,' he added. 'This was treason. This was every word you can think of.'
But if his enemies list was familiar, his capacity to pursue retribution appears to be expanding.
Repeatedly in his first term, Trump accused his perceived enemies of treason and tried to push the FBI and Justice Department to indict them. He told his chief of staff that he wanted to 'get the IRS' on those who crossed him.
Many of them were investigated, and two of them were the subjects of highly unusual and invasive audits, but none of them were ever charged.
The difference now is that Trump, much more so than during his first term, is surrounded by aides and Cabinet members who often appear willing to follow through on his angriest and most authoritarian impulses.
The Justice Department, whose top ranks are populated by loyalists, including two of his own lawyers, has shown a willingness to carry out Trump's personal agenda. The department has dismissed prosecutors involved not just in the criminal cases brought against him two years ago by a special counsel but also those who pursued Jan. 6 rioters. The department also dropped a prosecution against New York City's mayor after he agreed to help Trump on immigration issues. And the administration also targeted first-term officials who became public critics of Trump, like Miles Taylor and Chris Krebs.
But now the efforts to target top officials from previous administrations appears to be gaining momentum.
The intelligence community under Trump is engaged in a campaign seeking to show that Obama and his aides wrongly sought to tie Trump to Russian efforts to influence the 2016 election in Trump's favor -- and that some of Obama's officials and perhaps Obama himself should be held criminally liable.
Advertisement
John Ratcliffe, the CIA director, conducted a review that was deeply critical of the Obama administration and former CIA director John Brennan. Ratcliffe wrote on social media that the review had shown that the process was corrupt and then he made a criminal referral to the FBI.
Trump's director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, issued another report last week including documents that she asserted showed that there was a 'treasonous conspiracy' in 2016 by the Obama administration to harm Trump. On Wednesday, Gabbard released more material: a 2017 House Intelligence Committee report that took issue with elements of the Obama administration's assessment. Those House findings were at odds with a bipartisan series of Senate reports that later affirmed the work of the CIA and the other intelligence agencies.
The Trump administration reports have so far provided little or no evidence of wrongdoing by Obama or his aides, but Sunday, Trump posted a fake video of Obama being apprehended by FBI agents in the Oval Office.
It is not yet clear whether even a compliant Justice Department will be willing to open criminal investigations into Obama or other prominent Democrats and Trump critics, or be able to find grounds to do so. Even if prosecutors lodged charges, prosecutions could be difficult. Obama, like Trump, presumably enjoys immunity from prosecution for any official acts while in office, based on the Supreme Court's landmark presidential immunity ruling last year.
But Trump often seems intent on using the federal government to subject his foes to the same kinds of scrutiny he has undergone.
Advertisement
Infuriated by what he has sought to characterize as 'witch hunt' investigations and legal proceedings against him that started with the investigation into the 2016 election and morphed into the obstruction-of-justice investigation into him, he has levied crippling executive orders against law firms that had even fleeting connections to those episodes. That process has pressured many of the firms into committing nearly $1 billion in pro bono legal work to causes he favors.
Casting universities as breeding grounds for antisemitism and a brand of woke liberalism that he feels has opposed and denigrated him at every turn, his administration made an example of Harvard, using a whole-of-government approach to demand major changes. He pelted Harvard with major cuts to its research funding, tried to take visas away from its international students and launched a series of invasive and onerous investigations into the school.
Harvard is now negotiating a settlement with the White House, but the administration kept up the pressure by informing the school of a new investigation Wednesday.
He took an ax to what he saw as pockets of 'deep state' resistance inside his own government.
He has sought to cow news organizations, barring The Associated Press from the White House press pool, extracting big financial settlements from the owners of ABC and CBS in disputes over their coverage, and filing suit against The Wall Street Journal for its reporting on his ties to Epstein.
But, as his own supporters acknowledge, none of that is as important as putting one of his perceived enemies behind bars.
'If you tell the base of people, who support you, of deep state treasonous crimes, election interference, blackmail, and rich powerful elite evil cabals, then you must take down every enemy of The People,' Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., posted Sunday. 'If not. The base will turn and there's no going back. Dangling bits of red meat no longer satisfies. They want the whole steak dinner and will accept nothing else.'
Advertisement
This article originally appeared in
.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
23 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Trump can't save Olympic sports through executive order, but he can by funding them
There is probably little good that can come from President Trump's executive order on college sports given that it's legally questionable, vaguely written in terms of enforcement and an unpredictable stick of dynamite thrown into the middle of legislative movement on the current SCORE Act making its way through the House of Representatives. But rather than trying to limit by presidential edict how and what college athletes get paid, there is something Trump could do that would address one of the major concerns for his administration. Much of the executive order focuses on protecting opportunities for Olympic sport athletes. With athletic budgets getting squeezed by up to $20.5 million going directly to athletes thanks to the House vs. NCAA settlement, there's widespread fear that non-revenue programs across the country will be on the chopping block. And given the NCAA's role as the de facto development system for much of America's success at the Olympics every four years, a significantly smaller allotment of scholarships could mean both fewer educational opportunities for young people and an erosion of America's standing on the medal table. So here's a suggestion for the Trump Administration: Want to leave a legacy for Olympic sports? Use government money to fund them. Dan Wolken: Attempts to curb payments to college athletes keep failing. There's only one way forward. In nearly every country around the world except the United States of America, federal dollars are funding Olympic sports programs. But here, it's the responsibility of the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee and college athletic departments. The former is funded by corporate sponsorships and private donations. The latter is funded by college football. That system, imperfect as it may be, has worked for a long time. If it doesn't work anymore because the economics of college sports have changed, then we need to tweak the system. And if international domination of swimming, track and field and gymnastics is a priority for America, then what's the problem with taxpayers having a little skin in the game? It's not as if public dollars paying for sports is a new concept in this country. You can find the evidence by driving past nearly any pro stadium or arena if you live in a major city. Surely there are some smart people who can figure out how to build a federally funded joint partnership between the USOPC, various National Governing Bodies and the NCAA that coordinates and supports elite athlete development in a handful of Olympic sports that matter most, allowing schools to focus on providing opportunities and educating those who need athletic scholarships to attend college. Admittedly, this idea is a little radical, potentially impractical and rife with unintended consequences. But one way it could work, at least in theory, is that a certain percentage of the top American recruits in the key Olympic pipeline sports would go into a recruiting pool. When they choose a school, this government-funded organization would pay for the four-year scholarship, attach an NIL payment for the athlete to represent the organization and provide a grant to the school as reimbursement for the development cost. To make it more equitable, schools would be limited to a certain number of recruits every year from that elite pool of athletes. The rest of the roster would be filled with either foreign athletes or non-elite American recruits that they must pay for themselves. One obvious criticism of this plan is that smaller schools would get squeezed out even further, given that they're more likely to have a budget crisis than a Texas or an Ohio State and less likely to recruit elite athletes. This might require the NCAA to rethink how it stratifies schools into three divisions and instead move toward a two-tiered model where you either meet certain scholarship and funding standards to be in the Olympic development division or compete in the non-Olympic division, which would functionally be more like intramural or club sports. And maybe none of this is workable. But the point is, it's time to come up with some creative, bold solutions rather than just whining about how schools can't afford to pay for their non-revenue sports anymore. For many, many years, the USOPC has gotten a free ride on the back of the NCAA system, which has only been possible because universities illegally colluded not to share revenues with the athletes that played a significant role in generating them. But the good news is, all the systems are in place to keep Team USA's supremacy intact. There has to be a way for more formal collaboration between the USOPC and the NCAA that can save scholarships, development opportunities and teams from being cut. It just needs the funding. And the federal government can make that happen. Trump can make that happen. If he wants a real and lasting legacy as a president who kept the Olympic movement stable at a time of necessary change in college sports, that's how he can do it. Not an executive order destined to be picked apart and ultimately made irrelevant. This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Donald Trump can't save Olympic sports through EO, but could do this
Yahoo
23 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Commentary: Paramount appeased Trump — but now it has to battle Colbert and all his friends
There may be a new entrant in the annals of corporate hole-digging: Media titan Paramount, which owns CBS and recently said it's canceling the top-rated "Late Show with Stephen Colbert." Paramount said it needs to cancel the Colbert show for 'financial reasons' and leaked reports likely sourced to the company suggest the show loses around $40 million per year. But the decision reeks of Trumpian subterfuge, putting Paramount in the fraught corporate position of picking sides in one of President Trump's many disputes over business and cultural priorities. Paramount plans to merge this year with media firm Skydance, to help stabilize its finances and ease the transition from legacy media behemoth to a nimbler streaming operation. The two companies agreed on the $8 billion deal last year, when Joe Biden was president. The Securities and Exchange Commission approved the deal in February. That left the Federal Communications Commission, which must also sign off since the deal involves the transfer of broadcast licenses. FCC approval was 'widely seen as a formality,' as Deadline reported in April. But it didn't come until July 24, months later than would have been likely under any president other than Trump. In the meanwhile, Paramount paid tribute to Trump in unprecedented ways likely to dog the company for months or years, with the cancellation of Colbert's show fueling a barrage of criticism from Colbert himself and many allies, some of it on Paramount's own airwaves. Paramount clearly didn't anticipate this sort of trouble when it arranged the deal last year. But when Trump won the presidency in November, Paramount faced new barriers to a buyout that otherwise might have been routine. That's because of Trump's personal beef with CBS and the news show "60 Minutes." Trump sued the network last year as an individual, claiming the show distorted a 2024 interview with Kamala Harris, Trump's foe in the presidential election, to give her favorable treatment. Shortly after taking office in January, Trump appointed loyalist Brendan Carr to head the FCC. Then Trump converted the formerly independent agency into an arm of the White House's policy and political operations. One of Carr's first moves as Trump's FCC boss was opening an investigation into the CBS for its interview with Harris, an unprecedented effort to use government power to intimidate a news organization. 'The chairman of the FCC has cagily created a new and coercive technique for operating outside the agency's established statutes and procedures to attack corporate decisions he and Donald Trump do not like,' former FCC commissioner Tom Wheeler, now of the Brookings Institution, wrote in February. 'Prime targets are media company editorial decisions.' The Los Angeles Times and other news organizations reported that Shari Redstone, non-executive chair of umbrella company Paramount Global, pushed her executives to settle with Trump. Redstone and her family stand to net about $1.75 billion from the Skydance deal. So she has a clear interest in pushing barriers to the deal out of the way. That may explain why earlier this month, Paramount and CBS agreed to settle the Trump lawsuit for $16 million. Colbert roasts Trump regularly on his show and is far more political than David Letterman, whom he replaced in 2015. On July 14, the cheeky host called the $16 million Paramount payment to Trump 'a big, fat bribe'—on CBS's own air. Three days later, Paramount canceled Colbert's show. There's no public evidence that the company axed Colbert to appease Trump. Yet it did please Trump. 'I absolutely love that Colbert got fired,' Trump posted to social media on July 18. Then on July 24, Paramount received the FCC blessing to close the deal with Skydance. Mission accomplished ... Except for what is sure to be a very messy aftermath. Colbert's contract lasts until next May (same as the tenure for embattled Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell), and the show will air until then. 'For the next 10 months, the gloves are off,' Colbert told his audience on July cronies Anderson Cooper, Andy Cohen, Jimmy Fallon, Seth Myers, Jon Stewart, John Oliver, Adam Sandler, Christopher McDonald, Lin-Manuel Miranda, and Weird Al Yankovic joined that show for a spoof that ended with a Trump-Paramount kiss-cam exposé. The same day, Jon Stewart devoted half of his weekly Comedy Central program to blasting Paramount for trying to 'make yourselves so innocuous, that you can serve a gruel so flavorless, that you will never again be on the boy king's radar.' Stewart ended the show with a musical number, backed by a gospel quintet, featuring the refrain 'Go f— yourself,' which may or may not become an instant classic but is certainly giggly. Stewart's show, like Colbert's, runs on a network owned by Paramount. So does the animated series "South Park," which just debuted the premiere episode of its 27th season, in which a fictional Trump tries to seduce a [fictional] Satan, who mocks fictional Trump for having diminutive [fictional] genitalia. Maybe Paramount won the battle. But will it win the war? Will Trump really be satisfied that Colbert's Paramount-supported mockery of him might continue until next year? Or that Stewart and the diabolical "South Park" brain trust will keep tweaking him indefinitely? If Paramount cites contractual obligations requiring it to continue airing the Trump-bashing resistance, will Trump nod and say, right, of course? Big public companies make mistakes all the time. The memorable ones are those compounded by a corporate reaction that amplifies the original sin and makes everything worse. In 2023, Target tried to back away from its own LGBTQ outreach effort, offending the very people it was wooing and making no new friends in the process. In 2017, United Airlines appeared to defend thuggish security guards who forcibly dragged a passenger off a plane, igniting a firestorm of bad publicity that wiped nearly $1.5 billion off its market value. Uber co-founder Travis Kalanick resigned as CEO in 2017 after failing to shake months of controversy over a toxic company culture rife with sexual harassment and discrimination. Those incidents are now textbook examples of how to worsen a crisis, rather than fix it. Paramount now seems headed toward its own chapter in that cringy volume. Colbert, Stewart, et al. won't do Trump any harm, since they've been slamming him for years and have long been speaking to like-minded audiences. But now they're aiming their comedic lances at Paramount, which most of their viewers have probably never thought much about. That will change. Rick Newman is a senior columnist for Yahoo Finance. Follow him on Bluesky and X: @rickjnewman. Click here for political news related to business and money policies that will shape tomorrow's stock prices.
Yahoo
23 minutes ago
- Yahoo
President Trump's executive order on college sports: Here's what it actually means
WASHINGTON, D.C. — On Thursday morning in the nation's capital, NCAA president Charlie Baker spoke to a few dozen members and guests of the National Press Club — an operation located in Washington's downtown, just a short walk to the White House. Just hours later, the association's years-long fight for federal intervention in college sports received, perhaps, a boost from the man living just a few blocks away. President Donald Trump released his long-awaited executive order related to college athletics, announcing in a five-page order titled 'SAVING COLLEGE SPORTS' that he is directing members of his cabinet to create policy around several aspects of the industry that protect the NCAA and conferences from enforcing and creating rules to govern it. But what exactly does Trump's executive order mean? What will it change, if anything, about college sports' athlete compensation and transfer environment? The short answer, at least for now, is not very much. The longer answer is … well … there are still questions. What are the most important items in the order? Trump's executive order has been a long time coming. In fact, just last week Yahoo Sports obtained a copy of a draft of the order, which isn't wholly different to the one he signed and released on Thursday. Above anything else, the order's preamble describes the college athletics landscape as having been subject to unfair court rulings that 'created an out-of-control, rudderless system' which is 'under unprecedented threat.' 'Waves of recent litigation against collegiate athletics governing rules have eliminated limits on athlete compensation, pay-for-play recruiting inducements, and transfers between universities, unleashing a sea change that threatens the viability of college sports,' Trump writes in the order. He goes on to write critically that some schools are paying their athletes as much as $50 million this year from a combination of House settlement-related revenue share and third-party NIL. 'A national solution is urgently needed to prevent this situation from deteriorating beyond repair and to protect non-revenue sports, including many women's sports,' he writes. How he plans to do this is to direct various members of his cabinet — the attorney general, secretary of labor, secretary of education, etc. — to create policy around several concepts that the NCAA and conferences have been requesting help on from Congress for years. Among those: Protecting scholarships for non-revenue sports: The executive order, most notably, requires schools to maintain or even increase the number of scholarships they provide to non-revenue sports. This is geared to protect Olympic and women's sports that are at risk of elimination as schools direct more funding away from those and to the sports that generate the revenue like football and men's basketball. Those with $125 million or budgets (most of the power league schools) must provide more scholarship opportunities than they did last year, for instance. Those with budgets of $50 million must provide at least the same, as seen in a screen shot of the section here. Prohibit third-party, 'pay-for-play': You might call this the prohibition of booster collective pay to athletes, which, in a way, codifies the House settlement terms that prohibit collective pay to athletes if they are not deemed to be for legitimate endorsement or commercial opportunities. This issue is at the heart of negotiations among attorneys that is expected to result in a resolution soon that permits collectives to operate in a more open capacity than first thought. The executive order reinforces that provision in the House settlement. How does Trump plan to enforce these parameters? Well, that remains a bit murky, but he suggests in the order that members of his cabinet, as well as the Federal Trade Commission, have 30 days to create a plan on the enforcement of such, including potentially withholding federal funding for violators, opening up Title IX investigations, etc. Athlete employment: Trump directs the Secretary of Labor and the National Labor Relations Board to 'clarify the status of college athletes' — an obvious gesture toward the ongoing debate over courts potentially deeming college athletes as employees. As stated in the order preamble, Trump is against college athletes becoming employees and is clearly, with this directive, ordering cabinet members and the NLRB — he appoints the board — to rule that college athletes are students. Ironically enough, while many college leaders fight against employment, some of them believe collective bargaining is the only solution for the industry. Limited liability protection: This is another issue the NCAA and conferences have spent millions of dollars and six years lobbying for. They want to be protected from legal challenges so they can enforce their rules over things such as transfers, roster limits, booster pay — many of which have been deemed illegal by courts. Trump clearly disagrees with these court rulings, as he notes in the preamble. The order directs the attorney general and the chairman of the Federal Trade Commission to create policies to protect the 'long-term availability of college athletic scholarship and opportunities' when such is 'unreasonably challenged under antitrust' law. The attorney general and the FTC have 60 days to create such a plan, the order says. What are the immediate impacts of the executive order? The answer here is potentially … nothing. Trump's cabinet members — many of whom are quite busy with other more pressing matters — will need to make policy around these subjects. The specifics of that policy will dictate exactly how pivotal, if at all, this order is. What is a certainty is that whatever policies are created are not law and will likely be subject to legal scrutiny. Congressional action and court rulings are law in this country — not executive orders, legal experts tell Yahoo Sports. Baker even suggested this during his talk Thursday morning. 'You can't fix this stuff from executive order,' he said. 'Our focus for now really needs to be trying to get stuff dealt with through the legislative process.' As it turns out, Wednesday was a historic day for college sports with regard to congressional legislation. An all-encompassing federal college sports bill made its way out of committee for the first time since the NCAA's lobbying efforts began nearly six years ago. The SCORE Act, bipartisan but pro-Republican and NCAA-friendly legislation that many Democrats are against, received the necessary votes to advance out of committees and is eligible for debate on the House floor when members return in September from their traditional summer break. In many ways, the Score Act grants the NCAA and conferences similar protections as Trump's order. Above anything, Trump's executive order may get Congress to more urgently and swiftly push the bill across the goal line. However, if it does advance out of the House, the SCORE Act faces stiff pushback in a divided U.S. Senate, where at least seven Democrats are needed to overcome the filibuster and reach the 60-vote margin for any bill passage. The Senate, though, has been working toward the introduction of its own legislation, led by Sen. Ted Cruz, who, much like Trump, has made college sports regulation a priority. He's been in negotiations now for months with several Democrats, most notably Chris Coons, Richard Blumenthal and Cory Booker. No agreement has been reached despite more than a year of intense talks. Will Trump's executive order change that? It's one of many questions on the topic that remains a mystery.
