Trump's Obama ‘Russia-gate' push offers the MAGA Epstein crowd a head on a plate. Here's why he can't deliver on that promise

Yahoo

7 days ago

Tulsi Gabbard is the face of Donald Trump's newest bid to move the news cycle off the Jeffrey Epstein files.
But she, like the president himself, is likely to see her efforts end in the same murky water where the dreams of prosecuting Hillary Clinton died during Trump's first term in office.
On Wednesday, the White House trotted out the Director of National Intelligence, alongside press secretary Karoline Leavitt, to brief reporters on an intel review that Gabbard had led.
She told reporters that new evidence pointed to the involvement of former president Barack Obama and top officials in a supposed campaign to alter the conclusions of intelligence assessments, in order to forge a link between Trump and Russia where none supposedly existed.
It was an old theory with a new twist, which Gabbard laid out as an apparent years-long 'coup' attempt against Trump. She argued that Obama, along with former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, and former FBI chief James Comey, knowingly changed official intelligence assessments to explain the scope of the nefarious activity Russia was up to during the 2016 election.
'The implications of this are far reaching and have to do with the integrity of our democratic republic,' Gabbard claimed. 'It has to do with an outgoing President taking action to manufacture intelligence, to undermine and usurp the will of the American people in that election and launch what would be a years long coup against the incoming president United States, Donald Trump.'
It's at this point where Trump and the White House's call for 'justice' and 'accountability' (two words Leavitt and Gabbard floated Wednesday) runs out of gas.
In 2019, Trump's White House appointed a special counsel to look at the origins of the Russia investigation and found no evidence of criminal activity committed by Obama or other members of his administration.
And given how the federal statute of limitations works, the clock is ticking for Trumpworld to take a second crack at delivering the retribution the president has long threatened to levy against his enemies. Under federal law, most criminal charges have a statute of limitation of five years, meaning that the entirety of the 'Russiagate' probe's duration now falls outside the legal window for criminal prosecution.
To be clear, the statute of limitations does not apply to murder, or sexual abuse. Nor does it apply to treason, which Trumpworld has long, and frivolously, suggested charging Obama and others with. (Trump made that specific accusation once again in the wake of Gabbard's memo being published last week.)
Nor does the statute of limitations apply to another criminal count that could be leveled against the former president and members of his team in a last-ditch attempt to make something stick: conspiracy against rights. The latter charge carries a statute of limitations of ten years, not five, and as a result it's by far the most likely avenue for federal prosecutors to take if a real effort is made to deliver on Trump's promised vengeance. The New York Post reported that some of Trump's allies view it as their best shot. But opponents say even that would be a fool's errand.
'These bizarre claims against President Obama are a made up farrago of malicious nonsense. The context makes clear that this is an effort to distract from Trump's major Epstein problem,' Norm Eisen, a constitutional scholar and co-counsel for the first Trump impeachment effort in 2020, said in a statement to The Independent on Wednesday.
Eisen added: 'We at Democracy Defenders Fund have filed a legal demand under the freedom of information act for the Trump - Epstein documents and if we do not get them we will be litigating. But there is no basis for charging Obama with any crime irrespective of the statute of limitations, and plucking an offense out of thin air simply because it has a longer statute of limitations just highlights the baselessness of it all. '
The Obama "Russia-gate" push is the latest move by the Trump administration to attempt to quell outrage from the MAGA base after a July 6 DOJ memo concluded there were no more significant disclosures to be made in the Epstein case.
The pressure has also intensified on the president after it was revealed the DOJ told Trump in May that his name appears multiple times in the Epstein files, the Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday. The president had denied to reporters earlier this month that his name had been in the files.
Appearing in the files does not indicate that an individual has committed any wrongdoing, nor has Trump ever been accused of misconduct in connection with the Epstein case.
At Wednesday's White House briefing, Gabbard deflected questions on potential charges for former president Obama to Attorney General Pam Bondi, possibly the most embattled member of Trump's Cabinet thanks to the Epstein Files uproar.
'I'm leaving the criminal charges to the Department of Justice. I am not an attorney,' said Gabbard.
But the DOJ has been silent for nearly a week since the publication of a memo outlining the Director of National Intelligence's latest review. And the DOJ hasn't uttered a peep in terms of plans to launch investigations into Gabbard's findings, despite the director's claim that all evidence was referred to Bondi's office.
A spokesperson for Obama, meanwhile, issued a rare statement Tuesday calling the 'Russia-gate' accusations 'bizarre', and correctly noting that 'nothing in the document issued last week undercuts the widely accepted conclusion that Russia worked to influence the 2016 presidential election but didn't successfully manipulate any votes.'
The intelligence assessment, released by Gabbard, relied heavily on her conflation of the finding that Russian actors did not launch cyberattacks against U.S. voting platforms with a finding that Russia had not interfered at all. Like the Senate Intelligence Committee in 2020, the DOJ and other agencies found that Russia was behind influence campaigns on social media aimed at sowing election disinformation.
At the White House briefing, Gabbard and Leavitt presented that conclusion anew by inferring that Russia did interfere but without the goal of helping either major candidate in the 2016 race.
Conspiracy against rights would be an ironic charge for Trump's team to level against Obama, considering the president was accused of this in a criminal probe launched by special counsel Jack Smith over Trump's efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
This charge would require that Trump's prosecutors prove the existence of an organized plot between Obama and his advisers to keep Trump out of the White House — something even Gabbard didn't allege on Wednesday, as the intelligence probe did not turn up any evidence of a concerted scheme.
The Biden administration tried for four years to hold Trump accountable for his attempts to overturn the 2020 election. His mishandling of classified materials after leaving the White House also triggered criminal charges. But in both cases, the DOJ was too slow to bring the case to trial, and the charges were dismissed after Trump's 2024 election victory.
Trump was charged with conspiracy against rights for allegedly conspiring to violate the rights of millions of Americans by working with state legislatures and Congress in a half-cocked bid to throw out the 2020 election results pointing to his defeat. It's the same charge, down to the letter, that Obama would now face from a Trump-DOJ, if such an effort be launched.
Gabbard couldn't answer why those charges against Obama weren't pursued during Trump's first term.
'I can't speak to what happened there,' she said Wednesday. 'There were several [directors of national intelligence] under the first Trump administration. President Trump faced many challenges from those who were working in the government who sought to undermine his presidency.'