Can Barack Obama be prosecuted over ‘Russian interference' intelligence?

Al Jazeera

25-07-2025

US National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard launched a new attack on former President Barack Obama this week, alleging that he conspired to undermine Trump's 2016 presidential victory by using false intelligence purporting to show Russian interference in Trump's favour.
On Wednesday, Gabbard told a White House news briefing that she had declassified evidence of a conspiracy between Obama and senior officials in his administration. Gabbard said she had referred Obama to the Department of Justice for potential criminal prosecution.
However, declassified documents released by Gabbard this week, including a September 2020 report led by House Republicans on the intelligence committee, do not appear to implicate Obama in any apparent way, experts say.
'There is no evidence of criminal acts on Obama's part or anyone in his administration,' Barbara Ann Perry, who analyses US presidents at the Virginia-based Miller Center, told Al Jazeera.
Several investigations by Congress and the intelligence community have previously found that Russia did interfere in the 2016 election.
The document release and investigation come as the White House faces growing pressure from within Trump's MAGA base to release classified information about the high-profile sex offender and one-time Trump ally, Jeffrey Epstein.
'There is a direct correlation between diversion from the Epstein files, which Trump and his MAGA followers have demanded to see for years,' Perry said.
Here's what we know about the allegations Gabbard is making:
What has Gabbard accused Obama of?
Gabbard has declassified a 44-page report prepared by the House of Representatives intelligence committee in September 2020 that she claims proves that Obama and senior officials in his administration engineered a 'treasonous conspiracy' to suggest that Russia had influenced the 2016 presidential election in favour of Trump.
The report, which was led by House Republicans, reviewed how US intelligence had concluded that Moscow interfered in the elections in a January 2017 Intelligence Community assessment that was published two months after the elections.
'There is irrefutable evidence that details how President Obama and his national security team directed the creation of an intelligence community assessment that they knew was false,' Gabbard said at the briefing, adding that the idea that Russia interfered in the election to promote Trump was a 'contrived narrative'.
Obama's administration 'manufactured findings from shoddy sources … In doing so, they conspired to subvert the will of the American people, who elected Donald Trump in that election in November of 2016', she said.
Gabbard added that she had referred the former president to the Justice Department for a possible criminal prosecution.
Previously, on July 18, Gabbard released a separate batch of declassified information containing a trove of documents, including emails (PDF) from Obama administration officials in the months leading up to the elections. In it, they concluded that 'there is no indication of a Russian threat to directly manipulate the actual vote count through cyber means.'
Gabbard said in a statement that the Obama administration went ahead with investigating Russian interference after Trump won the 2016 elections, despite that initial conclusion and despite intelligence agencies like the CIA stating in advance of the vote that Russia could not affect the vote count. Those efforts were made to 'subvert the will of the American people' and amounted to a 'years-long coup' against Trump, she said.
President Trump, on Tuesday, accused Obama and top officials of his administration of treason. 'It's time to go after people,' he said.
Are Tulsi's claims correct?
Analysts say the report that Gabbard released on Wednesday, as well as the documents declassified last week, do not appear to provide evidence that Russia did not interfere in the elections to favour Trump, or that Obama ordered the investigation to reach a pre-determined conclusion.
Responding to Gabbard's claims that the Obama White House ordered an investigation into the matter despite US intelligence agencies repeatedly assessing that foreign adversaries could not launch cyber attacks on the elections, Perry of the Miller Center said there was a valid reason for Obama's delayed order.
'There was suspicion on the part of the White House that Russia was interfering with the election, but the Obama administration did not take direct action to prove its suspicion until after the election for fear of being accused by Trump of interfering in it on Clinton's behalf,' Perry said.
At the time, during the 2016 election campaign, Trump had repeatedly predicted at rallies that he might lose the vote because Democrats wanted to 'steal the election'. That atmosphere may have discouraged the Obama administration from doing anything until after the vote, Perry added.
In addition, the documents Gabbard released from Obama officials do not appear to contradict the established conclusions of Russian interference, analysts say.
Obama officials did not allege that vote counts had been manipulated, but rather that Russian hackers had launched covert digital operations aimed at sowing discord in the US during the vote, including by leaking emails of top Democrats, such as Clinton, and trying to influence opinion on social media using 'bots'.
The Senate Intelligence Committee report that Gabbard released, in which she hoped to undermine the Obama-era investigations into Russian interference, affirmed that position, although it blamed Obama administration officials for concluding that Russia interfered specifically to favour Trump.
Election interference encompasses a wide range of illegitimate means to change election outcomes, including vote rigging, vote buying or covert manipulation of voters.
Will there be a criminal investigation now?
On Wednesday, the Justice Department, under Attorney General Pam Bondi, announced the creation of a 'strike force' that will assess Gabbard's claims and consider potential next legal steps.
In a statement, Bondi said the Justice Department would 'investigate these troubling disclosures fully and leave no stone unturned to deliver justice'.
She did not give details about what the next steps might be.
Obama, as a former US president, enjoys civil and criminal immunity for actions undertaken during his time as president, which are regarded as 'official'. This could represent a stumbling block for any prosecutions, analysts say.
Indeed, in a landmark decision siding with Trump in July 2024, the Supreme Court confirmed that presidents have absolute immunity when they carry out 'official acts'. Trump, at the time, was being prosecuted for actions during his first presidency, which, prosecutors said, amounted to an attempt to influence the 2020 election results.
Perry of the Miller Center said Obama's order for an investigation constituted an 'official act'. The Justice Department could attempt to argue that investigating Moscow's interference in the US elections was not a core presidential duty, but that would likely be a weak assertion, she said.
What did the intelligence showing Russian interference say?
Several intelligence reports concluded that Russia did try to interfere in the 2016 presidential election, including investigations by two Justice Department special counsels, a Republican-led House committee on intelligence, which was recently released, and the Senate intelligence committee. The matter is one of the most extensively scrutinised in US election history. Russia, for its part, has denied the allegations.
Trump and his allies frequently refer to the investigations as a 'hoax' because they also attempted to examine links between Trump, his associates, and Russian operatives.
In January 2017, two months after the election, US intelligence agencies initially concluded that Russia had been responsible for cyberattacks on the email accounts of top Democrats, and for sowing discord on social media, using bots and trolls. The CIA said that the Kremlin orchestrated and codenamed the operation Project Lakhta.
FBI investigations also focused on individual Trump officials, such as George Papadoulous, who was indicted for providing false statements to the FBI regarding his relations with Russians.
Papadoulous was found to have known about the Russian operation, but there was no evidence that he had shared that information with the Trump campaign.
During Trump's first presidency, the Justice Department probed the conduct of the intelligence agencies regarding the investigations and found that there had been no 'political bias' involved.
The most followed report was released by special counsel Robert Mueller in 2019. It concluded that the 'Russian government interfered in the 2016 election in a sweeping and systematic fashion' through social media campaigns that favoured Trump, because Moscow assessed that it would benefit from a Trump presidency.
The operations sought to damage Clinton's image by hacking into email accounts of members of the Clinton campaign and leaking them to the public, the report stated. There was no criminal indictment, however, because Mueller concluded that there was no evidence that Trump's campaign coordinated with Russian agents.
An earlier (PDF) report by the House of Representatives' intelligence committee in April 2018 determined that there was no collusion between Trump's campaign and Russian agents. Importantly, it did not contradict the facts of Russian interference, however, stating that an extensive operation using social media and state-owned media house, RT, had been deployed.
One report, known as 'the Steele Dossier', compiled by counterintelligence specialist Christopher Steele, did allege close links between Trump and Russian operatives. That has since been debunked because of weak sourcing.
Where else has Russia been accused of interfering in elections?
French elections in 2017: Russian hackers targeted the campaign staff of then-independent candidate Emmanuel Macron during the country's April 2017 elections, according to government officials. Macron was running against Marine Le Pen, who had promised to take France out of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), and who was openly critical of sanctions against Russia. However, French cyber authorities said they had successfully fought off the attacks.
UK's Brexit referendum in 2016: There is no conclusive evidence of Russian interference in the 2016 Brexit referendum. While there were rumours of possible interference using bots and trolls on social media, the UK government 'turned a blind eye' to the allegations, according to a 2020 report by the UK Parliament's intelligence committee. The report also concluded that there was 'credible open-source' evidence that Russia had interfered in the 2014 Scottish referendum for independence and that Russia regularly tried to interfere in UK politics.